/blog

Part of the process of moving to a new role is an access review to ensure you only have the permissions needed for your current position. I logged in this morning to find that I no longer have access to MS Teams (despite originally being on the internal pilot roll-out and moving into an area where it is fully deployed) so can't talk to the rest of my, well, team.

I said yesterday that good can come out of social networks but this sentence from the New York Times about yesterday's Facebook outage really adds some perspective:

"When apps used by billions of people worldwide blinked out, lives were disrupted, businesses were cut off from customers"

It isn't right that so much of what happens online relies on just one company. Even beyond Facebook, internet traffic is routed through so few nodes that outages can cause wide swathes of the web to go dark. So much power shouldn't be concentrated into such small areas of responsibility.

There have been so many times when I've lost what I have typed because of becoming logged out of the blog but still tried to post. Logging in via another browser causes the hashed value held in the database to change meaning it no longer matches the one in session storage. If you don't refresh the page, it still looks like you are logged in but posting will obviously fail.

When hitting submit on a new post, I have added an extra step to save the cached content to a new variable in local storage (called 'safetynet') and, if posting fails due to being logged out, this value is written back to the post content cache so it is immediately available again when returning to the post form.

I do hope not but I know what it's like to not feel the compulsion to blog, to want to disappear from online life completely. I've always returned but who knows for how long.