technology

About six months ago I began co-hosting a podcast called Refactored…

It’s 2021, and finding a job is still a royal pain. What should you put in your résumé? How should you structure it? And for goodness’ sake, WHAT is the point of…

This post documents a very simple pattern for DRYing up strong_parameters knowledge to make your Rails controllers cleaner and virtually maintenance free (at least in the face of model attribute changes).

Jekyll is a great platform for managing static sites (like chris.tonkinson.com). It does the Right Thing™ out of the box, is simple to initialize and deploy, and it plays very nicely with some popular hosting options like GitHub Pages, S3, and Heroku. If roll-your-own-blog…

I love open source software for myriad reasons. Some are ideological, some are academic, and some are practical. One of the most beneficial practical aspects of open source software is that you can easily introspect what would otherwise be a black box.

Bruce Schneier explains the cost/benefits of the FBI throwing in the towel in the Apple case. Per his reputation for thoughtful analysis, this is well worth reading. At one point Schneier repeats what the industry has been crying for weeks…

I recently upgraded my FreeNAS from 9.3-STABLE to 9.10-STABLE. The process is easy — you simply adjust the update train, Check Now, and then Apply Pending Updates. This will require…

Subresource Integrity (SRI) has finally made its way into the Firefox release pipeline, having already seen release in Chromium/Chrome (currently version 45) and Opera (version 32). Firefox Developer Edition (the “aurora” channel, currently v43) already includes SRI…

I recently had occasion to shop for a new TV set. We’re not huge TV junkies at my house — we may watch an episode or two of…

Google announced yesterday a new compression algorithm they call “Brotli.” They bill it as a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77…