June 2017 Archives

Do you have feedback you'd like to give to Google, Facebook, StackOverflow, Inc., or Gandi? Now there's a website that will collect that feedback. Or... not.

There is a new TLD called ".feedback". It is a scam and ICANN should be ashamed of approving it.

The people that run .feedback have pre-registered "for free" 5,000 major companies. As a result you can go to sites like http://www.google.feedback/ and http://www.gandi.feedback/ and http://www.stackoverflow.feedback/ and more.

These websites enables people to send feedback about your company and products.

Will the company ever receive the feedback? Unlikely.

The company probably doesn't know the site exists.

If they do discover it, they are given a choice: Pay $20/month to receive the feedback, or pay $600/year to take the web site down. Of course, there is a free option: Just let the site remain and suffer as people send their feedback and feel ignored.

It is a perfect scam... what company wouldn't pay $600/year to avoid angry customers?

Most domains cost $10-$12 per year. Charging $600/year is highway robbery.

This reminds of the big internet scam where websites claim to be the lost-and-found for cities, taxi companies, etc. but really just collect money and do nothing useful with the information (listen to the podcast to find out what service they actually provide).

If you are one of the 5,000 companies being scammed, my advice is to be strong and not pay a cent.

Instead, ICANN should withdraw the TLD. If this scam complies with the TLD's original proposal, and nobody noticed, that is very sad. If it doesn't, then there is no reason ICANN should hesitate to stop this $3 million dollar fraud.

For more information, read this and this.

Don't forget to RSVP by 1pm the day of the meeting: http://meetu.ps/39FgcP

My high school had only one computer science teacher. When she had a problem or question, she had no where to turn. I can't imagine how isolating and stressful that must have been.

cseducators.stackexchange.com is a Stack Exchange website for computer science educators to ask questions and share successful teaching techniques. It was in private beta until this week. Now everyone can access. If it

Are you an educator looking for advice about how to integrate Git into an introductory CS class? Maybe you need to find a better analogy to help a student that doesn't understand 0-indexing? How do you convince students that well-indented code is worth the effort? What's a good emergency lesson plan you can substitute if the computers are down?

These are the kind of questions that computer science educators have and they're getting help right now at cseducators.stackexchange.com! If you are an educator, check it out. If you aren't, please consider helping answer their questions.

Most CS education goes towards hardware and software purchases, leaving educators very little support to help them be better teachers. I hope that CSEducators helps to fill that gap.

I hope the traffic to this site is enough that the site graduates from Beta to become a real site. This could be very powerful.

P.S. If you would like to discuss the site itself, there is a separate site for that called cseducators.meta.stackexchange.com.

Next week's NYCDevOps Meetup speaker is my co-worker, Mark Henderson, on the topic of "Measuring real-world DNS performance at Stack Overflow".

An in-depth look at how Stack Overflow records real-world DNS performance, and how you can do it too. You'll learn how we measured DNS performance when picking a DNS vendor, deciding whether or not to set up dual-DNS providers, and more.

The meeting is Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 7:00 PM at the Stack Overflow HQ in New York City.

For complete information and to RSVP, visit http://meetu.ps/39FgcP. Space is limited. RSVP soon!

This year's report is fascinating! There is clear evidence that DevOps practices yield remarkable results for IT teams and organizations. Findings are related to transformational leadership, automation practices, continuous delivery, lean product management, and DevOps in not-for-profits and organizations that use off-the-shelf software.

Here are a few things you'll learn in this year's report:

• How high- and low-performing teams automate differently
• The impact of architecture and team structure on IT performance
• The influence leadership has on DevOps transformations
• How DevOps practices affect deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and MTTR
• How DevOps helps organizations reach both their financial and non-financial goals

To download the report, visit the announcement on the Puppet website.

Three people from the SRE team took over this week's Stack Overflow Podcast. You can hear myself, Mark Henderson and Jason Harvey rant about important topics such as how we got our start, USB Condoms, and my opinionated interpretation of the "First Day Database Destruction" discussion on Reddit.

The podcast episode is announced here: (link)

You can skip all that and go directly to SoundCloud here: (link)

Enjoy!