Graham KingSolvitas perambulumWelcome ! This is the personal site / blog of Graham King. Most people come for the credit card generator, but I think the Categories (top right) are more interesting.November 1, 2015 Facebook’s code quality problemPosted in Software at 00:15 by grahamtl;dr: It looks like Facebook is getting the textbook results of ignoring code quality.Update: More examples, and insights from ex-employees in the reddit discussionFacebook has a software quality problem. I’m going to try to convince you with three examples. This is important because it demonstrates the time-honored principle that quality matters. In demonstrates it, as Facebook engineers like to say, at scale. I don’t work at Facebook or any competitor, I’m just an observer.Exhibit A: “iOS can’t handle our scale”About a month ago a Facebook engineer gave this presentation: iOS at Facebook, which was followed by a discussion on reddit.The Facebook iOS app has over 18,000 Objective-C classes, and in a single week 429 people contributing to it. That’s 429 people working, in some way, on the Facebook iOS app. Rather than take the obvious lesson that there are too many people working on this application, the presentation goes on to blame everything from git to Xcode for those 18,000 classes.Read the rest of this entry »21 CommentsOctober 26, 2015 Decrypt your HTTPS traffic with mitmproxyPosted in Software at 01:18 by grahamtl;dr Use the mitmproxy doc, return here if trouble.I am porting a server from Java to Go, and need to watch the traffic it receives. The clients include OSX and Windows desktop apps, talking to the server over HTTPS. Here’s how I did that with mitmproxy and iptables. We will setup a transparent proxy.Instructions are for Ubuntu (arguably the most popular server operating system), but mitmproxy will also run on OSX (anecdotaly the most popular developer laptop) using pf instead of iptables.Read the rest of this entry »CommentsAugust 26, 2015 OSCON 2015: ImpressionsPosted in Software at 04:19 by grahamI attended OSCON for the first time this year in Portland. This was a dream come true for me, I have wanted to attend for many years. Here are my impressions and some talk links. I can’t link you to most of the talks, because O’Reilly sells them for $1,000. Open Source indeed.First, it is a very big conference. They had 1,200 talk proposals, 4,700 attendees, up to 13 talks running concurrently, and two competing mobile apps. Twice I walked into a random Portland bar, which turned out to be hosting an OSCON-related event. It’s that big.Second, it is a strange mixture of open-source and commercialism. Sponsors above a certain level get a keynote. Tremendous efforts are expended to herd the attendees into the expo hall at every opportunity, towards the paying booths. And I can’t link you to the best talks, because as mentioned O’Reilly sells them. On the other hand a