Running Honk on Alpine Linux
With all the recent talk about the fediverse now that Twitter is on fire, I decided to give it a go by running my own instance. There's a lot of benefits to this - considering that you're joining a decentralised social networking system, you might as well own your data, and also start with a clean slate - you don't need to worry about other servers having already blocked the server that you're only just getting set up on.
2021 WOAP Burgers
Now that it's that time of the year again I figured I'd post my 2021 Visa Wellington On a Plate burger reviews here, and I'll be posting my 2022 reviews soon.
How to Upload a File or Image Using the Notion API
Want to add your own file or image to a database or page in Notion using their API? Unfortunately this is not (officially) supported yet:
Software as a 4D Construct
Last week, before a regular one-to-one meeting with the head of product and technology at my company, I came to a realisation - what if software is a 4D construct?
Locking It Down? Easy Tools to Help You Develop Secure Software
If you're like me, sometimes when you're working on bringing a great idea to life security can be a bit of an afterthought. You have already thought about the big stuff like TLS and implementing the right authentication and authorisation system, but there can still be blind spots - for example, how your application is handling user data flow, or how it's exposing that data to the rest of your application's code. Luckily there are tools that can help you with secure development, and I'll show you some of the big ones out there.
We Need To Talk About Technical Debt
And why product owners should also be developer advocates
Video Tutorial: Deploy a non-web Python application to Fly.io
In my first video I will show you how to deploy a non-web Python application to a platform-as-a-service called Fly.io - enjoy!
Review: GitHub Copilot Technical Preview
About a month ago, I got invited to the GitHub Copilot Technical Preview. It is essentially code autocomplete on steroids for Visual Studio Code - behind the scenes it's built upon an OpenAI machine learning model named Codex, which was trained using public code from GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow answers. It works with a variety of languages - so far I've mainly used it with JavaScript code.
Tech Culture Fatigue
Having a bit of a knack with technology as a kid had me wanting to work in the field when I got older, and the future was looking so bright - we were meant to propel the world forward, solve big ticket problems and make things more accessible for everyone. However, being at that point now, I am left somewhat jaded (a bit of an understatement).
Gaining ADB Access on a Mobiwire Sakari
Last year a technology retailer here in New Zealand, PB Tech, was running a Black Friday sale, and I came across their deal for a Vodafone Smart A9 - a rebranded Mobiwire Sakari "feature phone" - for NZ$13. I had previously encountered the phone a few more weeks before this at a display stand in a Harvey Norman store, and from briefly messing around with it, I realised it was running a really pruned back older version of Android. I figured at the time that I might as well buy one and see what I could get it to do.
Backing Up Data
Sorting out redundancy for physical stuff is easy - you either just get contents insurance or you could buy multiple units of an item and keep the rest of them in self-storage or any other separate location to your usual residence. Data is much different - you can't just buy an insurance policy for the data on your computer, call it day and sleep soundly at night - it requires a bit of creative planning, some legwork, automating as much as you can and diligently following a schedule for the rest.
Turning a Git Repository into a Simple File Host with Cloudflare Workers
Recently I used Cloudflare Workers for the first time to create the website you're reading right now (look at Fruition to learn how I did it), and I decided to try out writing some of my own workers to get an idea of what it could do.
The importance of "small sanitisation"
I've been working on a Python script that takes the contents of Te Ara and puts them into a compressed archive, after being inspired by how the entirety of the English Wikipedia's text and the Simple English Wikipedia's text can be downloaded as 18GB and 201MB archives respectively (as at March 2021), and wanting to have my very own copy of Aotearoa's history.
Flamingo Scooters API
A while ago I was working on an open-source scooter map web application and I wanted to add the locations of electric scooters that are offered for hire here in New Zealand by a company named Flamingo. I reached out to their support and they helpfully provided me with details about their public API.