A while ago I purchased a Nest camera because I liked the idea of only having to provide power and a WiFi connection to get a nice security system.
The fact that you could control it with Works with Nest (their open API) was a major factor in that decision.
Then Google bought Nest, and disabled access for users who didn’t sign up in time (including me).
While it’s pretty easy to look up bugs and the corresponding bug-fix for open source projects, you rarely see the process that went into it.
I think it’s in the benefit of everyone that we also share the how, not just the what, because at the worst, you just read something you already knew, but at the best, you learn about new approaches/tools/thinking.
I found some spare time to maintain one of my side projects, Graticule.
After bringing the dependencies up to date, I started testing the new build on some older Android phones that I keep laying around (an approach that has caught more bugs than just limiting myself to emulators).
On one of them, specifically an Alcatel OT 918 (Android 2.3.6 / API 10), the SSL handshake failed.
While reading David’s “One year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow”, I’ve learned about one of their products: Providence (a system for matching users to jobs they’ll be interested in).
Not sure why I’ve never heard about it before, but anyway, I was curious to see what it learned about me.
Luckily that wasn’t very hard, since they offer a way to download your personal providence data.