lol

God works in mysterious ways...

this guy found 1 mysterious way.

In Germany, the official API for querying the validity of a tax ID, has opening hours. It can only be queried from 5 am to 11 pm, and a response may take up to multiple minutes.

This is the most German thing I can think of. My assumption is that there's an employee manually checking the ID and then pressing a button depending on the result, which then triggers the response.

This API is supplied by the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern, which is basically the German version of the IRS: https://evatr.bff-online.de/eVatR/...

EVERYTIME!

Error handling done properly.

I was at the airport, 2AM, waiting for the plane I was supposed to board to come from another airport... Got bored, scanned the WiFi networks, found an open network with the ID of the airline I had booked with, joined, and tried port 22 on the gateway... It was a Cisco router with the default password... Needless to say, I thought I needed to teach those guys a lesson... Messed the routing table, changed its IP, disabled DHCP, and restarted the router. Needless to say, we couldn't board because they couldn't check us in...

I was stuck with an architectural problem for a few days. Tried to solve it in many different ways. I could always do a quick hack and call it a day, but.. That's not pretty and it would be a trip wire for future developments.

Went to bed at ~2am. Took a few hours before I finally fell asleep. In my dream I was solving the same problem as in real life, except there I found an obvious and simple solution. Woke up at 8am, repeated that solution to myself a few times to not to forget it. Implemented it in the evening and it worked perfectly!

Moral of the story: do not work late. Better go to sleep, rest your mind. You might solve the problem while resting, and you will need a clear mind in the morning to remember and implement the solution :)

p.S. This happened to me more than once.