Tips

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

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. ...

Today’s post is a quick tip on how to easily create a sleep-delay loop in JavaScript. ...

Have you ever considered a service or suite of services and thought, “that looks like a ball of yarn.” There is a tendency amongst those of us who write software for a living to consider systems that are not understood as garbage. Often, this suspicion of poorly understood systems turns out to be unwarranted. What look like obtuse decisions made for no apparent reason turn out to have solid foundation in rationality....

Today’s post will cover a couple different approaches to transfering techinical knowledge of a software system between individuals or teams. There are often transfers of ownership as a software product progresses from conception to feature development to ongoing maintainence. Effective knowledge transfers between owning individuals or teams help to ensure that ongoing development of a product is not totally stalled whenever ownership chagnes ...

Apache CouchDB 2.0 was recently released and has some compelling features for those looking for clustered document oriented databases. In today’s post I want to share a few of things that I’ve learned on how to use CouchDB’s new features and how to avoid some new user mistakes that we made along the way. ...

I enjoy running my own blog at codinginthetrenches.com because I am a technologist that likes to write. Unfortunately, sometimes my interests as a technologist get the better of my interests as a writer. This last week my competitive interests resulted in my blog being visually broken for several days. Furthermore, the competition has resulted in a few select articles being mis-formatted and visually broken for much longer than a week. Today’s post is about what I’ll be doing to avoid these problems and how they can apply to your own writing platform. ...

Networks are unreliable. Put more precisely, TCP networking can experience many different types of failures with resulting loss of connectivity. Do not let the linked post’s title fool you, it goes on to list a number of real-world computer networking failures. HTTP is a great way to communicate over the public internet, where failures may occur at any time, because the protocol itself is stateless and does not rely on a persistent connection. HTML5 WebSockets, however, do use a persistent TCP connection. A connection that can cut or closed without warning. Today’s post is a short commentary on adding error handlers and heartbeat messaging to WebSocket clients and servers. ...

Round robin DNS records are a technique for distributing load across public facing web servers. As an experiment we tried using them in order to distribute load inside of a cluster. We found this approach didn’t work. In this post I’ll discuss round robin load balancing, how it works at a high level, what we did with DNS, why it didn’t work, and what can be done instead. ...