Looks like this episode has vanished from the internets. Trying to download gets me this:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://api.soundcloud.com/resolve?url=https://soundcloud.com/techzing/techzing-316&client_id=4949f9f85ff88c4a4d644266e3037754): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
in /home1/jvincent/public_html/techzinglive.com/_mp3-redirect.php on line 5
Could not get the track because Soundcloud is down, or somethign welse weird is happening.

https://medium.com/@davnicwil/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-inline-css-74d152abedf5

My cousin was telling me to get one last year as it was going to be a particularly virulent strain. She has a phd in maths and works (as well as I understand it!) for pharmaceutical companies creating models to help them decide if some vaccine or other is worth developing, based on whether they could actually stop the spread of something with what they know about the illness and the vaccine they could create. If you are looking for someone who knows their stuff to tell you to get it or not, she is as close as I can get to that!

Anyway, last year I didn’t get it because I didn’t have time. Me and my wife then both got flu back to back (with 2 young kids to look after) and I ended up losing about 3 weeks of work. It’s not worth it to me to risk that again for sure 🙂

I wanted to mention that full hard drive encryption has been required by many of the companies I’ve worked with over my career. You don’t necessarily have it turned on by default but it can be enabled on both Windows and OS X (and I’m sure linux too, but I’ve not had the need).

On Windows you can use Windows Device Encryption or if you have professional the more advanced Bit Locker. See this how to geek article if you’re interested.

On OS X the feature is called FileVault and you can see details on enabling it here.

@Michael, I worked at a company in the past where someone checked in AWS keys to a repo. There are bots that troll github looking for those. Someone used $30k in ec2 instances for crypto mining before security caught it.

Also, those are really good points about the contractors and code secrecy.

Also, your points notwithstanding, you can’t let Justin off the hook that easily. Work with me here! 😉

“including the ‘they seem legit so I won’t press too much on hard tech questions’ being a definite mistake!”

Even when there’s a solid record, you come to realise after some experiences like this (a) public reviews for both sides (providers and contractors) are waaaay inflated and there’s very likely a huge disparity with private reviews (as was mentioned in this episode) (b) many providers just aren’t technical and would be oblivious to anything like inline CSS going on.

Point taken about inline CSS and React, but it comes down to professional communication. The contractor had 2 valid options – follow instructions or push back with a solid argument, but chose plan C – ignore the instructions and do something contrary without acknowledging it. Red flag when that keeps happening after pointing it out.

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About code secrecy, the biggest risk is leaving credentials in the code base. Or even if they’re not, ensuring any credentials provided are invalidated after a contract. That’s probably a lot more of a security issue especially as many developers don’t do a great job of isolating production config.

Anyway I realise this was the least of the problems but just wanted to pick up on the whole inline CSS topic – actually to be fair, inline CSS, either literally inline on elements or just colocated with markup, is really in vogue in the React world and is generally considered the better way of doing things, vs a completely external stylesheet with classes referenced by elements.

I’ve done things both ways (i.e. huge stylesheets and server templates with schemes like BEM for organisation, now with React for a few years) and have been completely sold on the benefits of inline CSS now. It turns out that the whole ‘don’t mix concerns’ thing is actually, in a lot of ways, misguided and embedding inline CSS is way simpler and easier to maintain if you are building your app in a componentised way, which I guess is implicit in most apps of any kind of complexity.

Anyway yeah, just wanted to point out that inline CSS does not necessarily a bad developer make (or bad person!). Especially if they’ve spent any time in React.