Hack of Trades

The year 2020 has been a unique one thus far, to say the least.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc among the planet’s population. It has proved to be an eye-opener and shown that mankind is and always will be at the mercy of nature, despite all the technology we have today to combat it when we need to.

Coronavirus is absolutely terrible and evidently life-threatening to those vulnerable. However, it has also done some good. It has accelerated the inevitable push for flexible work environments. That is, the ability of employees to work from wherever (home). Of course, this isn’t applicable everywhere in the world – predominantly in established countries with the technical infrastructure and culture to support it. More and more employers are now allowing temporary or permanent work from home ability, and this will only grow with time. I can go over the benefits in another post, but working from home is a no-brainer for many employees. You save commute time, you can complete errands during breaks, you can often wear almost anything without being judged, and you have a sense of not being watched. It’s almost like you’re your own boss, as long as you work your hours and meet and exceed expectations!

There isn’t necessarily a need to feel like you’re not being watched, but part of the joy of being an autonomous employee (should your role allow it), is not having someone breathing down your neck and watching your every move.

The unfortunate news for us ethical, responsible employees who don’t take things for granted (this is why we can’t have nice things…) is that many workers are abusing these privileges. Currently, even at my current employer, I’m hearing nothing but positive feedback all around. The employees are happy for the most part, and our leadership is becoming more open to allowing this flexibility down the road since everyone is doing such a good job and also cutting some corporate costs (i.e. travel).

However, I have a very strong feeling that performance of remote workers will plateau and curve down to low productivity levels as time goes by. I sense this has already happened, and this is also why many organizations will begin to really crack down and install software on the employees’ machines that track productivity. To what extent the following is legal, I do not know. But do not be surprised if any or all of your microphone, camera, screen, keystrokes, mouse movement, VPN use, idle time and internet usage are tracked and monitored.

You thought being confronted about walking into the office by fifteen minutes late used to be bad? Try getting confronted about what you were doing between 3:05 and 3:25 PM on a Monday since no keyboard activity was recorded during that window. Yeah, THAT is bad. And it is inevitable.

“Remember to block your breaks and lunches and tasks on your calendar and share them with me. Oh and I see you’ve been idle for 15 minutes, do you need help with something?”

-Your Supervisor

What was once a dream-job type of work environment for many may quickly become a modern age sweat-shop through technology. It’s even easier to micro-manage employee activity through technology than it was in the old-fashion office. Maybe it isn’t significant enough to notice yet, but it will quickly become a reality.

Welcome to this new wave of micro-management.

The 2020 Micro-wave.

Yes, you heard right.

I don’t always write bots. But when I do, it’s for a good reason!

Some background: Runescape is one of the most popular online multiplayer role playing games. It has a plethora of skills, adventures and activities one can pursue. Recently, a new skill was released – archeology. While we can always tell who the FIRST person was to get maximum experience in the skill, I thought it would be pretty cool to see the journey in doing so when compared to their top competitors in the final days.

The stack used in this ad-hoc project was a combination of PHP, MySQL and Tableau.

I’ve written several bots before for the hiscores on this game, so what I did was salvage a lot of the code in PHP and store it in a separate MySQL table. The script was set to run on a cron job hourly indefinitely until stopped. It would store up to the top 100 players of the skill on each run.

I let several days (or weeks) pass before I decided to actually look at the data and do something with it, and now was the time! Here’s what the table looks like:

Each record represents a player, and the rank, xp and record insertion timestamp at the time the data is captured. Unfortunately, no primary keys or players ID were configured as this was meant to be an ad-hoc analysis and I was lazy.

The next step was to decipher the data and prep it for analysis. What I really would like to know ultimately was who first got to 200M XP, and what their days leading up to it looked like. Were they consistently first place? Or was it a neck and neck battle for days?

We’re well past the day when the first player got to 200M XP. First, I had to figure out what date to look back from:

Turns out that day was 4/14/2020. Now, we want to identify the top 50 players when the first person reached 200M XP, so we can filter out all the other players that may have been top 50 at one point or another, but not on this 4/14/2020 run. I later re-learned the hard way that I couldn’t use limits in a sub query, so I created a temp table which we’ll use later on.

Now, the other piece to the puzzle we need is pulling just one record per user per day. To do this, we’ll identify the latest capture of each day so that we can filter based on just those exact times. In doing so, we won’t get any duplicate records for any users on any day – just the highest, latest data that was recorded for them for that day.

And now, we can finally write our beautiful query that will give us what we need. We want a data-set of all of those final top 50 players, and what their latest daily positions were.

We get 514 records (we have fallouts because those final 50 players may not have been in the top 100 the entire time). Then, we store these results in an excel file and add a connector in Tableau for ingestion and build some quick views.

Yikes! That’s messy…perhaps we should limit it to the top 5 players instead (I went through all that SQL trouble for nothing!)

That’s much better. And we see something interesting…

Le Me got first place, congratulations! It appears that he and several others have consistently been the top 1-3. What we do notice is Omid came out of nowhere for a very close finish. They were around rank 40 in early April, and made a huge comeback, securing the 3rd spot as of April 14th.

This bot may have been a waste of time, but it only took about an hour to set up and the trend I witnessed was fulfilling and made it all worth it! Who knows, maybe I’ll do more with this data later!

The SDLC mindset is one that is often instilled in a software engineer’s brain, even when it comes to his/her approach to solving real world problems. For those who don’t know, SDLC stands for the Software Development Life Cycle. It is essentially a series of phases throughout the entire lifecycle of a software project from request inception through delivery. There are sometimes variations of the incremental steps in the cycle, but generally, they are as follows:

Requirements

When approaching a real world problem, you can expect someone with a SWE background to first understand the nature of the problem in its context and in its entirety. We don’t jump directly into solving the problem, we first process all the contextual information available to understand the big picture. We must understand not only the micro-level components but also the maco-level interactivity and impact.

Design

Once we have a clearly defined problem to solve, we begin to design the solution. We determine all the different paths we can take, and narrow them down by assessing the resources available, feasibility, efficiency and long term sustainability of each solution. Often there are many ways to solve a problem. But one of the primary responsibilities of a good SWE is to employ the BEST solution by weight factoring the above mentioned attributes of each.

Development

Once we’ve nailed down the golden path we want to pursue, we then develop the solution to the problem.

Testing

Before adding the missing piece (solution) to the puzzle (problem), we must first ensure that it remains the best solution by means of testing against the attributes to ensure we get the desired results that were initially intended. The solution often can be optimized prior to implementation based on findings of the test phase.

Implementation

Once we pass the testing phase, we implement our solution to solve the problem.

Now that the problem is solved, we’ve done our job. But wait! Our job isn’t just to solve the problem and forget about it.

Enhancements / Maintenance

As a great SWE, we also have a responsibility to ensure that with requirements changing, our solution must be agile and be maintained and enhanced throughout the course of time! We make incremental improvements and optimize the solution based on the ever-changing environment.

And this is the thought process a SWE might engage in when faced with even the simplest real world problems. Hopefully this gives you some insight into what powers the light-bulb in our brains.

My current phone is a Google Pixel 1st Gen, the second one I’ve owned since the debut. Why? Because I like a quality experience at a quality price.

My Pixel, having been out for several years now, is quite outdated in terms of hardware; which also translates to an accordingly lagging experience with the OS and software. Moreover, since it’s a 32GB storage phone, I’ve been consistently getting “Running out of space” alerts, despite proactively backing up everything to Google Drive.

I was casually strolling and scrolling around on SlickDeals, one of my daily rituals to snag good deals, and came across the perfect phone for the perfect price. Specifically, this was the Pixel 3a. My reasoning for getting this device was two-fold:

The Bargain

The deal was, for $349, a brand new Quite Black Pixel 3a 64GB handset could be had, along with a $100 Amazon Gift Card. So in actuality, this brand new phone would cost just $249, all while it’s currently retailing for $399 MSRP. A flashy Pixel 4 device would be $699, in contrast. This offer was an absolute steal, so I had to jump on it.

The Quality

Touching back on the why. The Pixel 3a is a relatively new phone, less than a year old. This is subjective, as most users would consider anything over 6 months past launch date, “old”. I don’t care about any of that stuff. The Pixel has an amazing camera, and beautiful color interpretation. It’s great for social media. I’m a fancy car fanatic, but when it comes to a daily-driver cellphone, all I want is a reliable, fast, durable cell-phone. I’m happy with my Pixel 1 but I wanted something more powerful and up to date but not necessarily latest-and-greatest flashy.

I’m going to be unbiased here and say I’ve definitely owned Apple iPhones in the past. Their quality and reliability (for the first 2 years) is second to none. Unfortunately, iPhones never allowed the ability to customize apps, colors, fonts etc or incorporate widgets to the extent that Android devices did. Additionally, having that “developer” mind-set, building apps out of the blue for iOS was unlikely, as their barrier to entry is much higher given the high cost required to publish apps. I’ve also tried Samsung Galaxy phones in the past, which obviously run on android, and they weren’t nearly as fast, consistent and reliable as the iPhones. This is why many people including myself had a negative connotation towards ALL android-based devices. However, the Google Pixel changed that. It had the quality of an iOS device, with the open capabilities of an Android device.

The Undelete

The downside of technology is sometimes manufactures will go out of their way to do something absolutely unnecessary for the sake of technology. Electronic Parking Brakes, WTF? We’re unfortunately seeing a similar trend with smartphones, or maybe I’m just becoming old-school. I work in tech, so I have no choice but to embrace change and it’s just part of my career now to adapt to changes. But once you replace a fingerprint sensor with a facial recognition unlock feature, and delete the aux port, you’re really testing my loyalty. Yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. Pixel 4. A fingerprint unlock and an aux port are must-haves for me. Like I said, I like the Pixel 1, and I wanted something better, but don’t take away the staples because everyone else is doing it. So what should one do, if they want the latest Pixel, but with the “un-delete”, because they don’t want to be in the gym with an aux dongle or wireless earphones? They purchase the Pixel 3a of course!

Overall Synopsis:

$250 Phone? Check

64GB Storage? Check

Aux Port? Check

Fingerprint Access? Check

Badass? YOU BET!