Zed is Good Software
Here, "Good Software" is narrowly defined as software craftsmanship in areas that do not immediately or clearly benefit the end user.
quinn.io
Quinn's Blog
Latest posts
CCF Part 2: ESM Vendor
AFAIK there's no package manager for ESM
Zsh on Omarchy Without Breaking Anything
one of the limiting factors of Omarchy I mentioned in a previous post is that Omarchy does not support a configurable shell. Much of the system is dependent on the user's default shell being bash. For...
Catpuccin Scheme Generator
Simple way to create a color palette that switches on light/dark user scheme
CCF Part 1: Font Management
Simple tool to manage Google Fonts locally
Install Omarchy
I was backing up my servers, but I realized I have my home directory as a separate mount point, so I should be able to try installing Omarchy now without thoroughly backing up all my files: Filesystem...
How to fix joystick drift in Unity
How did we end up here I've decided to add Unity to my long list of unfinished "learn a new thing" projects. This decision was inspired by a few different things. The first is nastalgia for ...
Writing a C Compiler: Part 2, Parser and Code Generation
I've worked a bit more on the compiler, implementing the parsing and code generation steps. So, the program to compile is as follows: int main() { return 42; } Disclaimer: If you are interested in doi...
Writing a C Compiler: Part 1, Lexer
As a programmer I enjoy building things. I also like knowing how things work, I figure the two are related. There are a few things that I feel I've missed out on from not attending a CS program (nothi...
Setup serverless redirects on AWS with SSL and Route 53
All I wanted to do was redirect quinnshanahan.com to quinn.io. Simple, right? Simple enough to not require a server, right? As simple as this would be using a droplet or an existing host I have runnin...
Create a Blog With Github Pages and Gatsby
Setup a blog using Gatsby.js that publishes on push using github actions to github pages
Create simple services for web clients using API Gateway, CloudFormation, and Lambda
Functional demo can be found here: GitHub — quinn/lambda-nodejs-example Here’s a process for creating simple backends for a web client app. Use cases would be when you would like to add a small pi...
Setting up Docker Compose for Development
General project structure:
Change the default port that rails uses
Just a quick tip to save you from writing "-p 1234" on the command line.
Docker Tips and Tricks
Here are a few little things I use on a daily basis while working with docker.
Preventing brute-force attacks on Wordpress's wp-login.php
Even if you use a non-standard username and strong password it can still be a burden on your server getting hit with the occasional brute-force attack to Wordpress's login page. Here you can use ModSecurity to limit the number requests and save resources.
Analyzing historical apache log data using piwik
Sometimes tools like google analytics don't provide the insight you need and it can be helpful to go directly to the source: the log files.
Installing Metasploit on OS X with rbenv
Setting up metasploit from scratch can be a bit convoluted, here are steps I took to get it set up on OS X.
Facilitating Bidirectional Cross-Domain Communication with an Iframe
Using iframes in your app can be excruciating, especially when the iframe and the parent window are on two different domains. I'm going to go over the process of facilitating bi-directional communication between the iframe and it's parent window.
Log to STDOUT and STDERR when Running NGINX in the Foreground
I'm wrapping NGINX in a small go script to capture the output of the log files and pass them to STDOUT and STDERR. This is somewhat of a follow-up on my original post about running NGINX in the foreground.
Postgresql Array and Hstore Column Reference
I've had trouble finding a good reference for hstore and arrays in postgres that includes examples and use-cases so I decided to put together my own here. Hopefully others can get some use out of it. I've also included some examples of how to use with ActiveRecord.
Stubbing Rails request with custom Rack env
There are plenty of tools that provide easy ways to do controller testing in rails, but sometimes in can be nice to test against a specifically built rack env when testing a controller or middleware. Here I dig through some Rails internals to figure out some different ways of doing this.
Experiments with Docker
Docker is a wonderfully fun tool that makes building things like a PaaS almost trivial. I've documented a brief intro to some of Docker's common cli functions
Custom error pages in Rails
I know this has been documented many times, but I felt this was necessary because I am still seeing many more descriptions of the "wrong" way to do this rather than the right way. Hopefully I can help tip the scales a bit on the subject.
Running NGINX in the Foreground
If you're planning on using nginx as a frontend to one or more app processes, it can be helpful to setup and test things locally. An easy way to do this is to run nginx in the foreground so you can quickly iterate your config options to see what works.
Specify a local path for a gem in your Gemfile
Sometimes it can be nice to develop against a local gem without modifying your Gemfile. Bundler provides a convenient mechanism for this, but it is limited in the scenarios that it will work under. Here I describe a simple approach to get a similar effect.
Fundamentals of git
I'm going to document here some basics about git. I think a lot of very skilled developers who use git everyday haven't yet "grocked" the fundamentals of how it works.
faking placeholder from html5 in jquery
I just coded up a simple plugin to enable placeholder text for inputs in browsers that don't support it yet. This isn't tested thoroughly, please let me know if anything isn't working properly! Check ...
new website up contactjam.com, built using rails 3
Exciting news, my friend Kevin (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kevin-incorvia/20/339/508/) just launched an alpha of his new site: http://contactjam.com. Cool! In a nutshell it is a "foursquare"...
Quickly search through your Bash history
Is everyone up on ctrl+R in bash? It lets you do a reverse filter search through your bash history (kind of like history piped to grep but cooler). It's really handy, I'm guessing most everyone knows ...
Why I think datamapper is awesome
I know Datamapper is probably considered "old news" at this point, which is something I think unfortunate considering its low adoption rate. I'm going to re-hash its advantages here just to ...
Switching wordpress to nginx
I just updated my server to use nginx from apache/mod_php because loading wordpress on my tiny slicehost slice was tanking the poor thing. Apache was spawning processes like crazy and pages were takin...