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For me, becoming a Tech Lead was not something that happened one day, or even after a planned transition. It was something that I now realize started way back in my internship during college. Being a Tech Lead is something that you grow into, often because other leaders gave you a safe space to practice leadership, and you observed them and learned from them.
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When we talk about the Internet of Things, it's not just putting RFID tags on some dumb thing so we smart people know where that dumb thing is. It's about embedding intelligence so things become smarter and do more than they were proposed to do", said Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and founder of the One Laptop per Child Association.
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History is rife with inflection points, like the Brexit decision in the United Kingdom, or the 2016 election in the United States. Sometimes these events are instantly recognized as historic turning points, other times recognition comes slowly. One such slowly evolving inflection point began in the early 2000’s and has accelerated in the last 5 years—the transition from a cost-driven view of IT to one that is value-driven. We could also cha..
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Fingerprint scanners are pretty common in modern hardware both from Apple and some Android vendors. The problem is that the iOS and Android API’s for accessing them are a world apart. However, it’s possible to find some low level common ground which is exactly what our cn1lib for fingerprint scanning accomplished. This is a very basic API that just validates the user as the owner of the device, it’s useful to lock off portions of the ap..
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900 words, 3 minutes. Arno Breker’s Dionysos. 1936. 20+ years as CTO, Founder, Investor, Product Manager, Consultant, Engineer & advisor to corporations, law enforcement, government, & NGOs. Cyber Security Éminence Grise. Still a work in progress. This is how I got here: From Internet Start-Up To Global Telecommunications Giant In 5 Years I started researching computer and network security in the early 1990s and began my professional career..
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1200 words, 4 1/2 minutes. Welcome to the first post of my blog. Here I explain the why, what, and how of everything else you will see on this site. If you want to know more about the who, then read this. Most of my professional life involves winning systems or processes I’ve already established, monitoring progress or performance against targets, solving recognised problems. Here is where I introduce a few new ideas in a less formal enviro..
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220 words, 1 minute. Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Unless described otherwise, the contents of this site are provided under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. I am the sole author of the text of the articles appearing on this site. Where direct quotations are used they are attributed to their originator. Where images are used they are: Original Work. Typically diagrams or sketches.
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360 words, about 1 minute. The site is built and maintained by me using Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. It’s running on a FreeBSD nginx web server. By the time you read this nginx will probably be inside a jail. The theme is a port of Ghost/Casper. My criteria was low maintenance, good security, performance, and simplicity. The content is all written in Markdown in a text editor, Hugo’d, and uploaded to the server using rsync/s..
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Invalidate All Cloudfront Files From The Command Line As I mentioned before, this website is built using Jekyll which generates static html which is then hosted on AWS S3. This works great for me because it allows me to take advantage of the enormous capacity S3 offers while paying pennies per month for hosting and bandwidth. All the while I get to skip worrying about spinning up web servers, virtual machines, etc. I do love doing all that ..
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1 – Pay attention to your photo Your profile is 21 times more likely to be viewed if you have a profile photo. That’s also the first thing people will use to get a first understanding of who you are. So, make sure your photo is clean and broadcast the kind of feeling your want – not just the photo you had available while doing your account. #2 – Pay attention to your headline Your LinkedIn headline matters because :
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Update: I’m excited to say that we’ve now hired a (great!) technical writer, so the position is closed.
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Update: I’m excited to say that we’ve now hired a (great!) technical writer, so the position is closed.
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1 – Pay attention to your photo Your profile is 21 times more likely to be viewed if you have a profile photo. That’s also the first thing people will use to get a first understanding of who you are. So, make sure your photo is clean and broadcast the kind of feeling your want – not just the photo you had available while doing your account. #2 – Pay attention to your headline Your LinkedIn headline matters because :
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Earlier, we shared a set of questions and answers from our recent webinar, “I am a Technologist, Not a Female Technologist”, with presenters Dr Rebecca Parsons, Thoughtworks CTO, and Dr Susan Davis-Ali, Vice President of Organizational Transformation at ABI. While that post focused on actionable tips and advice for the technologist, we know that action must come from all directions in order to create the meaningful change so needed.
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As part of the bootcamp we wrote a couple of cn1libs and the first one is the Braintree cn1lib which allows us to do credit card payments within an app. If you aren’t familiar with Braintree it’s a PayPal company that provides payment integration for mobile devices. Notice that this differs from In App Purchase which targets “virtual goods”. This is useful for things like paying for physical goods and services e.g. paying for a taxi..
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Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more reasons added to the list of why you should use Postgres. Here’s the rundown of the things that make Postgres a great databa....
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Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more reasons added to the list of why you should use Postgres. Here’s the rundown of the things that make Postgres a great databa....
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LaForge and the fine folks at Osmocom ( Sysmocom ) recently had a femtocell giveaway . I didn’t expect to have much time to hack on things, but they were still quite generous in sending me one. It arrived, and I took some un-boxing photos for anyone who is curious. A box arrived in the mail... Which recurses into an inner box... Inner box is box like. Finally... The unit is displayed. Here it is in all its glory. It came co..
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LaForge and the fine folks at Osmocom ( Sysmocom ) recently had a femtocell giveaway . I didn’t expect to have much time to hack on things, but they were still quite generous in sending me one. It arrived, and I took some un-boxing photos for anyone who is curious. A box arrived in the mail... Which recurses into an inner box... Inner box is box like. Finally... The unit is displayed. Here it is in all its glory. It came co..
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Hi, everyone! The new Shared Memory proposal has reached stage 4 recently and I got really excited about it after reading a few blog posts on this subject, such as Dr. Axel's excellent post on his...
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Hi, everyone! The new Shared Memory proposal has reached stage 4 recently and I got really excited about it after reading a few blog posts on this subject, such as Dr. Axel's excellent post on his...
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The bootcamp is winding down and I’m finally back to our usual scheduled posts. I’d like to open with a common practice that isn’t nearly documented enough: use the native main/EDT threads. Our EDT serves many purposes but one of its biggest roles is portability. By having an EDT we get consistent behavior across platforms. iOS, Android & pretty much any modern OS has an EDT like thread that handles events etc. The problem is that they di..
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Official Hugo v0.20 docs A. Pages that don’t list lower level pages (e.g. /about/) ¶ Assuming the current version (0.20), a default Hugo folder layout looks like this: archetypes config.toml content data layouts static themes If you’d like to generate a bare, one-page site, create an ‘index.html’ in the layouts section. You can write HTML and CSS here, and voila, you have a site. However, if you want to add more pages (e.g. About, Co..
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For years now, I have wanted to switch my keyboard layout from QWERTY to something more ergonomic. QWERTY was designed to prevent typewriters from jamming. Modern computers don’t have this problem. So, why are we still using QWERTY? So, for me, it’s a given that I should switch to something else. But what? The Dvorak layout is the obvious choice. Most people who switch from QWERTY end up using Dvorak. Then there is Programmer Dvo....
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For years now, I have wanted to switch my keyboard layout from QWERTY to something more ergonomic. QWERTY was designed to prevent typewriters from jamming. Modern computers don’t have this problem. So, why are we still using QWERTY? So, for me, it’s a given that I should switch to something else. But what? The Dvorak layout is the obvious choice. Most people who switch from QWERTY end up using Dvorak. Then there is Programmer Dvo....
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Today Guy Podjarny had the pleasure of presenting at the amazing ServerlessConf in Austin, Texas about security in a serverless world. Here are the slides from his talk, "Serverless Security: What’s Left to Secure?"
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Checking if a variable is set in Jekyll This site is built using Jekyll which allows me to generate the entire thing as static html which can then be hosted on AWS S3. Working through the Jekyll documentation I couldn't find a way to check if a variable was set when coding in Jekyll's templating language Liquid. This is easy in python and javascript but after some digging I found this Github issue thread which (after a lengthy discussion) c..
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We are all different. Color, Race, Religions. Different brands of toothpaste. Different opinions. Lately, having different opinions is starting to turn into a real issue. Up to a point where people can’t even have a conversation about it. (Arguably, this was always the case, just that now, it seems it is getting harder to just ignore others’ opinions) It is not always easy to to discuss. Open conversations are hard.
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We are all different. Color, Race, Religions. Different brands of toothpaste. Different opinions. Lately, having different opinions is starting to turn into a real issue. Up to a point where people can’t even have a conversation about it. (Arguably, this was always the case, just that now, it seems it is getting harder to just ignore others’ opinions) It is not always easy to to discuss. Open conversations are hard.
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