Coding in the Trenches

I recently bought a new domain and wanted to host a couple new static pages on it. I decided to do this using some new-to-me tools as a learning exercise. This post is about a couple things I learned along the way to hosting Michael On Random with Cloudflare CDN and Backblaze B2. ...

I want to run some numbers on the energy used by our electric car that we purchased nearly two years ago. We’ll compare that to a roughly equivalent gasoline car. This is an interesting exercise because we bought what is considered a relatively inefficient EV. Let’s do some light arithmetic. ...

This is a continuation from a post in April, 2023 on low-code and AI. ...

Last time in off-topic tax time we covered a small piece of how individual income taxes work in the US. This time, I’ll vent about why this is frustrating and why the alternatives are not great. It’s a positive feelings post. ...

In this post I give a short explainer on how federal income taxes function for individuals along with examples of why they are complicated. In a follow on post to this I will cover some thoughts about how we, collectively, can help make it simpler. ...

Should organizations that need to build software care about low code? Should they ever have cared about low code? Will low code be the future of how software is built? Will large language models trained to write code based on text prompts replace all developers? Are these same questions applicable to AI? Do I have answers to these questions? Nope, but I can still editorialize. ...

A quick review of: AWS WorkMail. It’s ‘meh’, more after the break. ...

It is more than mid-way through 2021. I should not be writing an essay about the nuances of log out. Yet here I am writing one; it is still an area that can be confusing. Today we’ll explain some simple and some complex sign-on and sign-out integrations with examples. ...

Let’s talk about spooky things that can happen while using the GitHub Marketplace or the Visual Studio Marketplace for build pipeline extensions. Much has been written this year about about supply chain attacks. In short, an attacker can gain access to a target by looking for an easier to compromise dependency of the target. This is a simplification, but it captures what happened with the SolarWinds incident, NPM package namespace incidents, and earlier Maven based attacks. ...

Let’s talk about cross origin resource sharing (referred to as CORS from here on), what it is, where it is used, and some mistakes I made when configuring this website’s hosting. After reading this you will hopefully never wonder again why that little error about not being ‘CORS-enabled’ shows up in the browser console. ...