Today I learned about OpenStack Swift CORS issues & tech meetings in the workplace

CORS OpenStack Swift

When configuring OpenStack Swift, you must not forget to configure CORS to allow cross-origin requests.

In my case, I did configure CORS correctly by using the following commands:

openstack container show [container_name]
openstack container set --property X-Container-Meta-Access-Control-Allow-Origin='[URL]' [container_name]

But one thing I didn't do was to add the https:// to the URL. It took me a while to see the missing "s" in the URL.

Tech meetings

Today I learned a few important things about tech meetings. It's not necessary today, but it was a real reminder for me.

There must be someone leading the meeting

As much as we might want meetings to be collaborative and self-organizing, the reality is that without someone taking the lead, discussions tend to go in circles or stall. A clear leader helps keep things on track and ensures decisions are made, which I am not, so those kinds of meetings become very frustrating and I tend to take a leadership role as a consequence. Maybe that's why I like to work on my own projects, where I can be the leader and make the decisions.

People need to own the subjects

It's crucial that each topic or subject discussed has an owner—someone who is responsible for driving it forward. Without ownership, action items get lost and nothing progresses. This is actually why we often don't care about the meetings in our company, there's no ownership of the subjects.

You need developers who care

The effectiveness of tech meetings (and projects in general) depends on having developers who genuinely care about the topics and outcomes. If people are disengaged or indifferent, things simply don't move forward. I see this quite often with junior developers who are often not engaged in the meeting and don't take the time to read the documentation and follow the progress of the meeting.