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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I will not stretch the analogy of jugglers juggling and engineering teams engineering too far. In brief, software and system engineering teams can benefit from working on a few things simultaneously but too many or too few can cause everything to fall apart. ...

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? ...