Thinkst Blog

Two weeks ago we ran the second edition of our internal HackWeek, and it was fantastic. Last year’s event was great fun and produced projects we still use; going into this year’s HackWeek we anticipated a leveling up, and weren’t disappointed. We figured we’d talk a little bit about the week, and discuss some of the “hacks”. Our HackWeek parameters are simple: We downtools on all but the most essential work (primarily anything customer-facing) and instead scope and build something. The project absolutely does not have to be work-related, and people can work individually or in teams. The key deadline is a 10-minute demo on the Friday afternoon. The demos are in front of the rest of the team, and results count more than intentions. Everyone participated and everyone presented at the Friday demo, including sales, dev, support, back office and yours truly. We strive to keep Thinkst a learning organisation and this HackWeek is one way that we do it. For example, it’s great to see a salesper...

Dan Geer famously declared that security is “ the absence of unmitigatable surprise ”. He said it while discussing how dependence is the root source of risk, where increasing system dependencies change the nature of surprises that emanate from composed systems.  Recently, two of our servers “surprised” us due to an unexpected dependence, and we thought this incident was worth talking about. (We also discuss how to mitigate such surprises going forward). Background : Every Canary deployment is made up of at least two pieces. Canaries (hardware, VM or Cloud) that then report in to the customer’s dedicated console hosted in EC2. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that the code and infrastructure we run is secure , and we ensure that any activity on these servers that isn’t expected, is raised in the form of an alert . A few weeks ago, this real-time auditing activity tripped an alert on a development server. Servers are either built as production servers, which have been tested ...