Coding in the Trenches

Technologist blog

AI. Again. The boring manager's view.

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

September 2, 2023 · Michael Hughes

Taxes part two

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. ...

August 20, 2023 · Michael Hughes

US Individual Taxes

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. ...

July 30, 2023 · Michael Hughes

Is low code all that? AI???

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. ...

April 20, 2023 · Michael Hughes

AWS WorkMail is meh.

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

April 14, 2023 · Michael Hughes

How to log out and related topics

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. ...

August 9, 2021 · Michael Hughes

A brief discussion of CI/CD plugins

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. ...

July 31, 2021 · Michael Hughes

Cross Origin Headers (CORS), AWS S3, and AWS CloudFront

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. ...

June 26, 2021 · Michael Hughes

Some thoughts on partition keys in clustered databases

Partition keys are a common concept among distributed software including CouchDB and Azure CosmosDB to other systems like Kafka and AWS Kinesis. They are a key input into the system that has consequences on how well it can be used to solve different end user problems and how well it performs under load. ...

May 16, 2021 · Michael Hughes

Related to the topic of service level objective values

What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? Continuing from our prior post in January, let’s know discuss some aspects of using these percentage values in the context of how to guarantee availability. ...

May 4, 2021 · Michael Hughes