Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

HAProxy and Nginx abuse and rate limiting

My brother wrote a follow-up – HAProxy abuse filtering and rate limiting – to his previous post – Nginx rate limit by user agent (control bots).  This is just a tip of the iceberg that we are working with at the office, but it’s pretty cool.

Hopefully, soon enough our Ansible playbooks will be up to date and shareable…

Smart Reply in Gmail

Google Blog announces that Smart Reply feature is coming to Gmail on both Android and iOS.  It has been introduced earlier in other products like Google Inbox and Allo, and is apparently so useful that about 12% of all replies in those applications are done with the help of Smart Reply.

There’s also a link to the Google Research Blog article which has more details on the technology behind (machine learning, artificial intelligence, native language processing, and all the usual suspects).

A Million Words Published at Work in a Remote Company

Sara Rosso shares some thoughts on what to document and share, after publishing over a 1,000,000 words while working at Automattic.  Here’s the gist of it:

  • If you’re the go-to person for something in your company, consider how much of it is just gatekeeper information you could document properly to help someone else learn/grow from or work on independently.
  • Separate out processes and historical background from your strategic expertise. Processes and backstory are not really ‘what you know.’ It’s much better to be a person someone asks ‘why’ or ‘when’ to do something vs. the logistics of a ‘how.’ How can and should be documented for others to build off of regardless of your involvement. This should free you up to be more involved in the why, the new, and the next of your work.
  • If you’re repeating yourself in private chats or (gasp!) email on a specific topic, document it. That’s also what drove me to create this blog – being able to answer someone’s question with an answer you’ve already carefully crafted for someone else is a great feeling (and a great use of your time)!
  • Will someone want to know why you decided or executed something a specific way later? Share as much background as possible so colleagues are brought up to speed immediately. Share the setup & thought process you went through, where to find more information, and even the facts, ideas, or information you considered but deemed outside of scope for the particular project. My goal is to hopefully never have someone ask “where did this come from?” or “what’s your source?” or “did you consider this?” (when I had) and instead focus on enriching the discussion or challenging my ideas vs. asking me for information I should have provided in the original post.
  • Gather the best, most complete, or authoritative things you’ve authored and submit them as potential onboarding materials for new team members. Challenge them to ask questions and to find something you need to document.
  • If important progress is made, be sure to update your documentation, or retire in favor of something newer or more complete. We do this by linking from old posts to new ones, and all it takes is a quick comment and a link on an old post.

HAProxy SNI

“HAProxy SNI” is pure gold! If you want to have a load balancer for HTTPS traffic, without managing SSL certificates on the said load balancer, there is a way to do so.

The approach is utilizing the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension to the TLS protocol.  I knew about it and I was already using it on the web server side, but it didn’t occur to me that it’ll be utilized on the load balancer.  Here’s the configuration bit:

frontend https *:443
  description Incoming traffic to port 443
  mode tcp
  tcp-request inspect-delay 5s
  tcp-request content accept if { req_ssl_hello_type 1 }
  use_backend backend-ssl-foobar if { req_ssl_sni -i foobar.com }
  use_backend backend-ssl-example if { req_ssl_sni -i example.com }
  default_backend backend-ssl-default

The above will make HAProxy listen on port 443, and then send all traffic for foobar.com to one backend, all traffic for example.com to another backend, and the rest to the third, default backend.