Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 2, 2019

Zestful

• Had a meeting with an app developer interested in integrating Zestful
• Fixed 115 mislabeled training examples
• Noticed that the site’s website ranks poorly on Google, so fixed some low-hanging SEO fruit:
  • Added richer text to the <title> tag
  • Added a sitemap
  • Added a <meta> description

The data thief

I had my first abusive Zestful user and spent way too long trying to fight them.

• First, I got a message from my log backup service saying I exceeded my daily limit
• I thought, “Great! That means people are using the service a lot today!”
• I checked my billing dashboard: zero paid API calls. Uh oh…
• Checking AppEngine, I realized that a user was abusing my free demo (limited to 30 calls per IP) by constantly shifting IPs
• The IPs were coming from AWS, who conveniently publishes a JSON of all their IP ranges, so I wrote a quick script to block AWS IPs from my AppEngine project
• Script broke after 1000 IP ranges because AppEngine is limited to a maximum of 1,000 firewall rules
• Attacker was still going with non-AWS IPs, so I blocked the CIDR blocks associated with the new IPs
• One of the IPs was coming from a company called ParseHub, who sells IP rotation services.
• I asked ParseHub to blacklist my site from their services, but they pretended they didn’t know how.
  • Apparently the service whose business model relies on profiting from data theft is not particularly motivated to prevent data theft.
• I ended up blocking a few more CIDR blocks and countries, and the attack has stopped for now.

But the whole thing was dumb because it doesn’t really cost me anything if a user is a jerk and uses my service without paying. I burned almost two full days playing cat and mouse with the attacker when I could have been working on features that improve the service for paying users.

What Got Done

• Conducted an in-person customer interview with a local startup founder
• Added Markdown previews to submission page
• Tweaked some of the CSS
  • Landing page: before vs. after
  • Recent posts page: before vs. after
    • This one I’m not sure about. I worry I made it look too boring.

Is It Keto

• Tweaked the CSS based on ideas from this excellent website teardown video
• Before vs. After
  • Changed the background color to a slightly greenish white to make the white cards pop more
  • Added box shadows to the cards and search box
  • Added a bottom border to the navbar for better contrast with the site body

mtlynch.io

• Wrote most of a new post called, “The Dumbest Task I Ever Outsourced”
  • Wrote a spec to hire @LoLo_ology to draw the cover art
• Published my July retrospective
• Realized I’d been misusing headers in my Jekyll theme for 3 years
  • I was using # for top-level headers, ## for second-level, etc.
  • The minimal-mistakes theme expects the author to start at ## for top-level headers.
  • So I did a global replace to increase all the hashes by one
  • The new headers look better. They actually look like section and subsection headers instead of having the same formatting as the post title.

Dusty VCR

• Published episode #9: The Addams Family

Beekeeping

• Rendered some beeswax
• Assisted with a friend’s honey extraction to learn how to harvest honey.

Misc

• Sent personal invites to six local developers / founders for the August Indie Hackers Western Mass Meetup
• Balanced my books for July
  • Ended the month with a $174 profit (my best month since quitting my job)