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Search - "git-blocking"
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Coworker in my team recently said to boss:
"Thanks, this conversation with you has taught me so much about single-threaded blocking I/O"
Some random PR comments from our company's repository:
"Are you insured? I hope you are insured"
"Learning git is not that difficult. You only need one command: git reset --hard"
*Link to amazon for dog poop bags*
"Please clean up your shit, before I step in it"
"Have you thought about a career in sales? At least there you might sell your bullshit"2 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.4 -
Sent my changes before everybody for code review, got git blocked because today was demo day, and ... And asshole guy merged his own PR without code review. That conflicted with my PR. I am going to start posting the shennanigans of asshole guy from now on, just to have a record of his stupidity.10
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is it necessary to have cherry picking a part of git branching/release process?
we have 3 branches : develop, release and master.
currently every dev works on feature as follows : they make a branch out of develop, write code, raise pr against develop, get it reviewed and merge back to develop. later the release feature list is generated, and we cherry pick all the release related commits to release branch, and make a prod build out of release branch. finally, the code is moved to master and rags are generated accordingly.
so the major issue with this process is feature blocking. as of now, i have identified 4 scenarios where a feature should not be released :
1. parallel team blocker : say i created a feature x for android that is supposed to go in release 1.2.1 . i got it merged to develop and it will be cherry picked to release on relase day. but on release day it is observed that feature x was not completed by the ios dev and therefore we cannot ship it for android alone.
2. backend blocker : same as above scenario, but instead of ios, this time its the backend which hasn't beem created for the feature x
3. qa blocker : when we create a feature and merge it to develop, we keep on giving builds from develop branch adter every few days. however it could be possible that qa are not able to test it all and on release day, will declare thaf these features cannot be tested and should not be moved to release
4. pm blocker: basically a pm will add all the tickets for sprint in the jira board. but which tickets should be released are decided at the very late days of sprint. so a lot of tasks get merged to develop which are not supposed to go.
so there's the problem. cherry picking is being a major part of release process and i am not liking it. we do squash and merges, so cherry picking is relatively easy, but it still feels a lot riskier.
for 1 and 2 , we sometimes do mute releases : put code in release but comment out all the activation code blocks . but if something is not qa tested or rejected by pm, we can't do a mute release.
what do you folks suggest?10 -
"Worst drunk coding experience?"
My alcohol tolerance is very low. So, every stupid attempt of my coding in such a state is the worst experience.
There's this pulsing feeling in my skull every 10 seconds blocking my attention.
And there's an increased chance of mistyping commands.
One time, for some reason, I kept "pulling" the git commits when I actually wanted to "push" them. I spent a lot of time finding out why the f*<k GitLab is not showing my new commits in my PR before realizing my sheer stupidity.
And it takes me only one 3.5dl can of low alcohol content (like 3% abv) drink to relive these experiences. WTF. -
How do you protect your team's git remotes?
We tend to protect the master and stage branch from force pushing and only allow merging pull requests after successfull recent tests and successfull review by someone with proper permissions. Depending on the project the Dev branch is only protected from force pushing though. All other branches are free to handle however wanted.
We recently had someone do a "git push -f --mirror" without understanding the command. Quick reminder what that does: it mirrors all your local branches to the remote so that the remote will be a mirror of your local repo. Branches that exist on remote but not on your machine will be removed from the remote.
A then needed to work from B's feature branch but of course that was gone... So while the idiot didn't fuck up our protected branches he still fucked over other people's workflow with that.
Is there an alternative to outright blocking force pushes which could have prevented that (except force pushing intelligence into his brain)?7