A little Nix fix Mar 02, 2024 A meandering wander around the scary magical future of package management.
TIL: Monorepo Makefile inheritance with shared variables and targets Jan 30, 2023 Mingled Makefiles for a multirepo milieu.
TIL: Emacs Lisp - write a string to a file Jan 05, 2023 Put some Hello World in a file.
TIL: Encode and decode text in Emacs Lisp Jan 03, 2023 A short guide to string encoding in elisp.
Today I Learned: Background Jan 03, 2023 Brief notes on the matter of sharing brief notes about the inner guts of technology.
Writing better API documentation: a few lessons from enterprise integration Jun 29, 2022 Over many years working on API integrations, I’ve seen a whole lot of ways that the experience could be less frustrating. This isn’t a definitive list but a personal collection of a few recurring problems with documentation I’ve seen in different REST APIs that could be avoided. Explain what a field does Consider API documentation like this: String[] tags - “This field contains tags for the post.” This is not helpful. ...
Possible vulnerability in Sainsbury's and Nectar website Mar 16, 2022 In February, I discovered a potential vulnerability in the Sainsbury’s and Nectar website. Sainsbury’s is one of the UK’s main supermarkets, and Nectar is the loyalty card programme they own in partnership with a bunch of other retail brands like Argos, Esso and British Airways. The vulnerability is not that exciting and I have no way to know whether it is possible to misuse it without breaking the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which I obviously don’t want to do. ...
iTerm2 URL matching is pretty neat Mar 20, 2021 For many years, other developers told me about iTerm2 and I ignored them. I really shouldn’t have. The stock macOS Terminal was fine, I thought. What a mistake. There’s lots to love about iTerm2, including the ability to script it in Python. But a really amazing quick win is the support for Triggers. Triggers allow you to set a regular expression that gets acted on every time they appear in the terminal. ...
Too sarcastic for the Twitter joke police: an adventure in automated moderation Feb 18, 2021 In which computers built by Silicon Valley-funded companies fail to get British humour. ...
Never trust a Time Machine made by a computer company Dec 31, 2020 In which Apple makes me very, very weary. ...