Impostor.
In 2024, I announced that I was quitting my high paying tech job to become a high school computer science teacher. This Big Scary Thing™, as I called it, was a huge leap of faith; I had no formal experience in education, but I had spent years volunteering in classrooms and mentoring students, and had an opportunity to take a break from my burnout that I simply couldn't turn down. After two…
Sometimes you just want to read without HR getting all judgy and putting you on a "performance improvement plan," so I recently decided to make a Visual Studio Code extension that renders eBooks as code in (18?) languages. Dubbed "CodeReader," this extension takes any EPUB file (hopefully, I haven't tested all the EPUBs) and renders it in valid-looking code, allowing you to discretely read your…
Dear friends, I present to you the next generation in software development: eval++! Inspired by GitHub's recent release of their Copilot SDK, I decided to take a stab at one of the most controversial functions of all time and make it better, using the power of AI. Eval++ is an LLM-powered replacement of JavaScript's eval() function that can probably handle any code or code-like text you throw at…
Did you know that there's a Wikipedia page that lists all of the assigned /8 IPV4 address blocks? A person, if they were so inclined, could take this list (or a subset of it) and block all of those IP addresses from accessing their website using Caddy's remote_ip matcher (or whatever the equivalent is in your web server of choice). As an example, let's say that we want to block all of the IP…
There's a lot of shitty news happening lately, and I've been having trouble holding space for it all. I've noticed that my 2020-doomscrolling habit has started to ramp back up, so I built a Google Chrome extension (with a little help from Gemini) that automatically redirects my browser to a Kindle book in my library whenever I try to go to a site that I think is hurting my mental health: It's been…
Some of you know this, but I got into computing after being exposed to MUDs in the late 90's. For the uninitiated, MUDs were the text-based precursors to MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft—in fact, Everquest was even sued by one of the progenitors of the entire genre because the game, while graphical, had elements that were so eerily similar. I've been in love with the genre ever since,…
Here's a little "cognitive complexity" tip for your next programming project: get rid of your else statements. Okay... maybe not all of them. But as many as you can, because unnecessary else statements can decrease the readability of your code in small, but often very meaningful, ways. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule—which was made abundantly clear when I posted this on LinkedIn and triggered a…
In the late Summer of 2020, still deep in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and dealing with a near constant sense of dread and anxiety, I had an appointment with my optometrist that changed the course of my life and career. After a few dozen rounds of "A or B, 1 or 2?", he asked me if I still "worked with computers" for a living. I was a Principal Engineer at a cybersecurity company called…
I recently spun up a .onion mirror of this website. Why? Because why not. And also because I can. Oh, and free speech and anti-censorship and all that jazz. I'd like to pretend that it was some grand technological challenge, but if I'm being entirely candid, it was like 3 commands and 4 lines of configuration. If you, too, would like to become a member of the dark web, here's how I did it: 0.…
Banned Books Week was like... a week and a half ago, but I missed it because I don't pay enough attention to arbitrary days of observance. My bad. I have some thoughts, though, and thought I'd take the opportunity to share them, despite their fashionably late arrival. For absolutely no reason—none whatsoever—I've been thinking a lot about censorship and freedom of expression in the United States…