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Wars, Votes and Wires
Geopolitics, elections, sanctions and what they do to tech
Where world events hit the industry: wars and the people working through them, elections and tech policy, sanctions, internet shutdowns, chip export rules, drones, OSINT, and how all of it lands on developers. Heated is fine. Hateful is not.
48 members
18 posts
Created May 2026
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Community rules
Sources for claims
If you state something as fact, link where it came from. Opinions are fine, label them as opinions.
No dehumanising anyone
Criticise governments, armies and politicians all you want. Attacks on people for their nationality, ethnicity or religion get removed.
No graphic content
No gore, no execution videos, no "look at this footage". Describe it, do not post it.
Argue with the post, not the person
Disagree as hard as you like. Insults, slurs and dogpiling get removed, and repeat offenders get removed too.
Moderated by Marta Kovalenko
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Discussions
Practical, not news. UPS and starlink setups, working through blackouts, remote jobs for EU clients, and ways to help. Everyone welcome, keep it useful.
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OSINT, fact-checking, civil debate on sources
Showing 18 posts.
Posts in t/wars_votes_and_wires
Raising a daughter in Hsinchu while the news talks about blockades
I am a process integration engineer at a foundry in Hsinchu. I will not say which one and I will not say anything about work, customers or yields, please do not ask. I want to write about something else: what it is like to live here, in the middle of a topic that people far away discuss like a strategy game. The ships on TV My daughter is 7. During the large drills, the news shows maps with red arrows around our…
- People say we live what you fear. My advice from here: make the bag, then live normally. Your daughter will learn calm from you. And thank you for quoting me, I didn't expect it.
- "Nobody who writes these rules lives in my street" should be printed on the wall of every policy office. Beautiful, careful piece.
- Translation please? I can see it's beautiful even without reading it.
- 50 seconds is impressive and also very sad. I hope your kids fell back asleep.
- ❤️ un abbraccio from Milano
- June 2024 in Nairobi, the internet "slowed down" exactly during the protest at parliament. Official reason was cables. Maze, sure. Achieng is right, that's why it works as an excuse.
I left Moscow in 2022 and I still cannot get paid like a normal person
I want to say first: I am not asking for pity. Ukrainians have it much worse, I know this. This is only a post about what is it like to be a relocant developer with a Russian passport, because people ask me and I am tired of explaining it in DMs. I left Moscow the week mobilisation was announced, September 2022. Belgrade, because Serbia did not need a visa and I had a friend with a sofa. I am against the war. Против…
- Glad the job worked out! For other people reading: the Serbian residence plus local bank took Artyom around 7 months. Plan for that, it is not a bureaucracy you can rush. And Artyom, Java is still better than Kotlin.
- This is the result of sanctions. They hurt normal people like you, not Putin. Is obvious, but nobody want to say it.
Scraping county election results on election night without getting blocked (or getting it wrong)
Primary season means I spend a lot of evenings refreshing county results pages. Here's how our desk does it, after some years and some embarrassing mistakes (mine). 1. Call the county first Seriously. Many counties publish a JSON or CSV feed behind the pretty results page, and many use the same few results vendors, so once you know one feed format you know a lot of them. Ask the elections office what the official…
- "Flag it, never drop it" is the most important line in the post. Silently discarding the anomalous rows is how good pipelines produce confidently wrong numbers.
- Source on the county feeds being accurate in the first place?
About a minute to the shelter, and coming back from reserve duty to a codebase that moved on
Two stories. Both true. Both about deploys, kind of. One. In Haifa we have about a minute from the alert to the mamad, the safe room, sometimes less. I was in the middle of a rollout, kubectl rollout status running, new pods coming up. Alert. I grabbed the little one, my wife grabbed the big one, laptop stayed on the kitchen table. Ten minutes in the mamad, kids asking if the boom was close, me saying no with the…
- I'd guess we disagree on a lot, and I'll keep saying what I think about Gaza in other threads. But this is a human post and I'm glad I read it. Mind yourself and your kids.
- Thank you for writing this. May I ask, how do you explain it to your children? My daughter is 7 and asks why the news shows ships around our island. I do not know how much to say.
tech workers are workers, and yes that includes asking what our cloud sells to militaries
ok so a few people asked after my comment in the sanctions thread what "organizing my workplace" actually means. here's the long version. opinion throughout, sources where i state facts. why i started not because of some big ideological moment. because of on-call. our rotation went from 8 people to 5 after a "restructuring", nobody's comp changed, and the pager didn't care. then the layoffs came by calendar invite…
- Brother, someone builds the networks that keep a base running and a pilot coming home. I do it every day and I'm proud of it. Not saying y'all can't ask questions. Just saying the person answering might be me. my 2 cents
- Agree on the habit. The best analysts I've worked with are the ones comfortable writing "unknown" in a field instead of guessing.
July 2024: five days without internet, from inside a Dhaka software house
Marta asked me some weeks ago to write this. Today is the anniversary, so I am trying. Sorry if it is long, actually it is the short version. I work at a software house in Dhaka, around 40 developers, almost all our clients are in Denmark and Norway. In July 2024 the student movement started about the job quota, and it became much bigger than quota. I was on the streets some evenings after work. I will not write…
- dai, reading this after what we went through in Kathmandu in September last year. social media ban, then the streets. same feeling, same anger, same young people. hope your new government does better than ours haha, ke garne
- Strong post, respect. I'll be honest, Indian TV coverage at that time was garbage, lot of shouting, very little reporting. One question though, and I ask it sincerely: what about the attacks on minorities after August? That part also needs to be said.
Developer survival guide from Tehran: npm, Docker, Go, GitHub and the 403 lifestyle
سلام. I write backend for a ride hailing and delivery app in Tehran, Go and Python, team of 14. Many people outside do not know what sanctions mean for a normal developer, and many developers in other sanctioned countries ask me the same questions. So this is the long version. Everything here is about using public open source and running things ourselves. Nothing exotic. The real problem is over-compliance US…
- This brings back Khartoum university for me. Half the downloads we needed gave us 403 in those years, we passed USB sticks with JDK installers around the lab. Ya zol, it is 2026 and it is the same story with different logos.
- and the same governments sanctioning you sell weapons to everybody else. hypocrisy as a service
One year after the twelve days: what I changed in how I work
Last June, for twelve days, there was a war over my head. I do not want to explain Iran in one post, I cannot, and people who ask me to do it in one comment are usually not asking a real question. I only want to write what happened to my work, because many developers in many countries may need this one day, and I hope they never do. The first nights we heard explosions in Tehran. My parents went to my aunt in the…
- The "if the internet dies" doc is the most underrated thing in this post. We wrote one for our Khartoum colleagues in 2023, two weeks too late. Stay safe ya Arash.
- Printed on paper is the part people will skip and should not. Thank you for writing this calmly, I know it is not calm inside.
Why I will not help you find where a soldier lives
After my geolocation post I got several DMs. Most were nice. Three asked the same thing: there is a video of a Russian soldier, can you find his home address, his family, his mother's page. One person wrote "you are Ukrainian, you should want this more than me". I understand the feeling. I have it too. My answer is still no, and here is why, so I do not have to write it in DMs again. 1. You will get the wrong person…
- Дякую, Марто. People think it is a game when it is far away. When it is close, you see who really pays.
- Also legally: in the EU, compiling and publishing a private person's home address is processing of personal data without a lawful basis under Art. 6 GDPR, and in Germany it can also be a criminal offence since 2021. Good intentions are not a legal basis.
Six checks before you share war video (I do them every time, also for my side)
Last week in one of my Ukrainian Telegram chats somebody shared a video with caption about a "new" strike. I knew the building. It was from 2022, I verified it myself back then. Forty people had already forwarded it. Nobody was lying on purpose, they were just angry and fast. So here are the six checks I do, every time, in this order. Takes 5-15 minutes. If you do not have 5 minutes, you do not have time to share it…
- Sending this to my family WhatsApp group!! They share everything 🤌 my zia shared a "new" video last week that was from 2019 ahah
- Arma 3 point is so true. My uncle sent me "Ukrainian air defence" video, it was literally the game, with HUD visible in corner. He is 64, he still does not believe me
- Just found this via the topic. Stay safe 💙 and what's the two walls rule?
Welcome to Wars, Votes and Wires. Please read before posting
Hi all. I made this topic because war and politics threads kept appearing in other places, in a Postgres question, in a remote work post, under a meme, and every time it became a mess. But I also do not think we can pretend tech is separate. Sanctions decide who can use npm. Shutdowns decide who can talk to their clients. Cheap drones changed what a "hardware hobbyist" is. Chips are geopolitics now. So here is a…
- honestly glad this has its own topic so i can mute it 😅 no offence marta, i read your osint stuff, i just cant do politics before my coffee
- label opinion as opinion. half this site will be banned in a week