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. ...
Using AST parsing for deriving IAM rules May 19, 2020 With enough metaprogramming, security can be fun. ...