Critical Point War Stories with Kevin Riggle: Software Engineers Talk Breaking Production Critical Point

Host Kevin Riggle interviews Andrey Petrov about three different incidents he was involved with: A programming mistake in high school that filled its alumni's email inboxes, a Twitter analytics site he built that got co-opted as part of a phishing scam, and how he won a bug bounty on the Ethereum blockchain rollup prototype developed by superstar hacker George Hotz.
Chapters:

(00:00) - Intros/titles

(05:02) - The Alumni Email Explosion

(18:00) - The Twitter Tracker Takeover

(33:09) - The George Hotz Ethereum Rollups Bug Bounty Bonanza

(57:02) - Socials/outro
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWuqAePsquoNews coverage of the Twitter Tracker Takeover:“New Twitter Scam Won't Show You Your 'Stalkers'” - NBC Newshttps://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44123467“Beware: Twitter spam viral application on the loose” - Posilanhttps://www.posilan.com/2011/07/20/beware-twitter-spam-viral-application-on-the-loose/“After a lull of a few months, new Twitter Phishing Scam phrases appear” - Just Practisinghttps://www.justpractising.com/social-tools/twitter/after-a-lull-new-twitter-phishing-scam-phrases-appear/ 

Andrey's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shazowFarcaster: https://warpcast.com/shazow.ethWeb site: https://shazow.net/
To subscribe to the video version of the podcast on YouTube, and watch other Critical Point content, check out https://youtube.com/@critical-point 

Credits: 
Edited by sleepingsage.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Kevin Riggle interviews Melanie Ensign (Discernible Inc.), former Global Head of Security, Privacy, & Engineering Communications for Uber, about building good bug bounty programs, incident management processes, and one especially memorable Christmas morning.
Melanie's company: https://discernibleinc.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieensign/Twitter: https://x.com/imelunyMastodon: https://defcon.social/@Wednesday
Credits: 
Edited by sleepingsage.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Kevin Riggle interviews Deb Chachra, professor of engineering at Olin College and author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS about climate change, the housing crisis, the green/sustainable energy transition, and how we can build a better world for ourselves and everyone around us.
BUY DEB'S BOOK! https://criticalpoint.tv/infrastructure
Deb's Twitter: https://twitter.com/debchaBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/debcha.bsky.socialMastodon: https://saturation.social/@debchaWeb site: http://debcha.org
Big Dig podcast from WGBH Boston: https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
Chapters:

Credits: 
Edited by sleepingsage.

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta about Akamai and its role in the history and development of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).  Bonus episode outtake from https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/he-broke-turkish-twitter-abhijit-mehta
Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehtaAbhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/
To watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube, check out the channel page at https://youtube.com/@critical-point
Credits:
Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).
Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr
Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes
Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.
Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta, who tells how one tiny dot made almost made a massive difference to Twitter's Turkish ad revenue.
Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehtaAbhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/
Chapters:
(00:00) - Intro

(01:25) - How did you find yourself in a place where you could break production?

(08:53) - Akamai & the 'aha' moments of product development

(15:30) - Google & the Google culture

(17:35) - Twitter & what's the difference between brand ads and direct-response ads?

(23:58) - How Twitter made its money

(27:58) - Re-architecting the fundamental ad platform at Twitter

(32:35) - "We had to be really careful!"

(34:48) - "There's something really weird happening in Turkey"

(37:49) - The meaning of scale

(41:02) - "Well we'd thought of all the horses, so we started looking for zebras"

(43:48) - "So here's what happened"

(49:30) - "So this will work fine almost everywhere"

(53:51) - How do you roll things like this out safely?

(59:56) - "In general I'm an optimist, there's exciting things to come"

(01:03:52) - Thanks & CTAs
Credits:Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).
Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr
Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes
Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.
Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Kevin Riggle interviews Julia Lunetta, who tells us how an ostensibly minor change caused her employer, a financial institution (Upromise Investments), to miss its overnight reconciliation with its banks.
Credits:
Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).
Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr
Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes
Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.
Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).