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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I have seen critical enterprise applications run in VBA in excel.

    I wrote one of them. It replaced periodically writing down application outputs on paper and sounding the alarm if something went pear-shaped. It wasn’t my job to develop software but I didn’t want hand cramps to be my job, either. I had vague ideas about how to do what I wanted to do with Excel so I poked at it and googled until it worked. More than a decade later, I’m no longer there but that freakin spreadsheet is still running 24/7, being proudly showed off during tours of the facility.

    I will cackle if MS ever pulls the plug on VBA.




  • You can make rules network-wide, per-app, or per-incident. The latter is useful for getting a handle on app behavior. Like if you see it contacting ‘updates.somedev.com’ weekly, you can choose to allow or disallow permanently based on how benign you think the app is. But more likely, anything trying to phone home has a dozen CDNs it’s trying to hit rather than an easily identifiable URL. Block one, it tries to hit the other. Maybe today, maybe next week. It gets overwhelming (which IMO is a feature for the dev, not a bug).