In launching ManageMemberships, I’ve had my own experience grappling with technical debt. At the start of development, my vision was clear: everything needed to be perfect. I wanted flawless code, 100% test coverage, and pristine adherence to the…

I’ve been working on adding access control functionality to ManageMemberships. On its surface, it seems like a simple problem. For the first iteration I was wanting to use bluetooth (per the client’s request) to communicate with an esp32 which…

I've been enamored with the Laravel ecosystem for quite some time. I've shipped quite a few projects for clients and even my own project: ManagememberShips.com. In the past I was an advocate of CakePHP, however, out of the box Laravel has more…

I was helping a client on a project that involved syncing nzbs between usenet networks. There were open source solutions that did this on a smaller scale, but he wanted to have several terabytes of mirroring happening 24/7. One issue was trying to…

I had a slow day the other day and decided to continue my tinkering with Golang and Serverless architecture. I rather quickly banged out Activity Ideas Now. On the infrastructure side, I went with AWS Lambda and an S3 bucket to keep things…

I definitely have a skill issue in that I don't work within the Windows server ecosystem very much. If given the choice, everything I do is Linux based. I've recently taken on a project where the existing hosting was Windows and they're running a…

As part of my ongoing efforts to use Go and AI as much as possible, I recently came upon a project where a client needed to translate large text files to another language. They had been using an online AI service to do this manually. However, the…

In 2015 I switched this blog from WordPress to Jekyll. Now, almost a decade later I guess it's time to keep up with the times. Some items broke or were having problems after I tried to post an update to my blog after almost 8 years of inactivity.…

While tidying things up and redoing the Jekyll install, I was reminded of this post from 2016. I'm not sure if I was just incredibly green or if the process has gotten significantly easier but releasing apps to the App and Play store is not nearly…

In response to the new dkim/spf requirements implemented by Google and Yahoo, I've been having to do a lot more work with DNS recently. Thankfully tools such as mxtoolbox and dmarcian make inspecting and generating SPF and DMARC records a breeze…

I don't ordinarily do app development, but I recently had a project working with a long-time client that involved creating an Ad-Hoc App so that he could showcase some of his video files on his iPad. There were a lot of tears and headaches involved…

It's been several months since my last post. I figured it was about time to take a breather and get some words out there. Recently I've been working on an SaaS project that involves completing and signing several documents. It was decided that PDFs…

This weekend I attended SecureWV (previously Hackercon) for the first time. It was very informative. Though I missed the first day, there was an excellent presentation on Physical Security and a Python workshop. I look forward to going next year.…

This weekend I attended Ohio Linux Fest. This was my second year attending, but my first year presenting. It was awesome. A lot of fun was had. Here are some pictures.

I've been getting more and more interested in unit testing lately, especially continuous integration to help spot bugs immediately while the errant code is fresh in your mind. Unit testing is a way of testing particular chunks of your code to make…

I've received a decent amount of traffic on an article I wrote earlier about docker here which is now pretty much completely useless. This article was written shortly after Ohio Linux Fest and I was super stoked to mess around with these sweet new…

Inspired by the latest WordPress XSS forced patch, I've migrated over to Jekyll for my personal blog. I had mentioned possibly using something other than Jekyll in my related blog post here. Originally I was concerned about moving WordPress content…

I've been using WordPress for a while now and I've always enjoyed how easy it is to develop custom themes and plugins for it.  Recently a couple of colleagues expressed concerns with using WordPress for some projects that I'm involved with…

Keeping with the tradition of doing temperature related things with the Arduino, I decided that I was going to finally get my LCD display working and make it extra fancy by hooking it up to the internet. Unlike with the Twilio project, we will be…

The most unnerving task that I have to perform on at least a weekly basis is pushing updates and changes to production servers.  With a great deal of preparation and planning the amount of headaches involved with this task can be almost eliminated…

I recently had the pleasure of configuring a VPN between a data center in Virginia, one in California, and an Amazon VPC.  The fun part was that we had to do this with no physical access to the machines and without having admin access to the switches…

I recently bought an Arduino Uno kit with an Ethernet shield and a LCD output. So far it has been a lot of fun tinkering around with. My first 'useful' project was to take the example system they gave to display a temperature reading from a thermal…

Ansible is a tool designed to automate tasks on several machines at once and define their role within a network.  It is well documented here and there is even a video here.  There is already a wealth of information about Ansible out there, so this…

Check out my later blog post for more accurate and up-to-date information on docker It's not uncommon for a new developer to join a project and be required to set up a local dev environment.  Depending on the company, there may be little instructions…

Recently I started working on a fairly complicated, high-volume Magento website.  This website had a development and a production server and the client was juggling several different modifications at once in an effort to boost their sales and improve…

Recently I started working on a fairly complicated, high-volume Magento website.  This website had a development and a production server and the client was juggling several different modifications at once in an effort to boost their sales and improve…