Learning mentoring

I think the essence of mentoring is about asking questions; the mentee (receiver of guidance) asks questions about something they want to learn, whereas the mentors main task is to come up with questions to guide the mentees thought process (Socratic method).

mentoring

Browser defaults are crazy

I could use you as a bot to assault web services I dislike, utilize some of your compute to calculate stuff I’m interested in or mine cryptocurrencies. I could use it to gather enough information about you that I can recognize you from a different browser or private mode. I could run P2P (peer to peer) software to have you help serve content I want to spread. Oh and how nice of you to leave this tab open for a while before you had time to read it, right?

security, privacy

Supply-chain monitoring

Software used in this article is locked to specific versions to increase the chance of it working as specified. Make sure you update all of it if you want to actually start using it after experimenting. I’ve had this article lying around for a bit before publishing, so versions are pretty outdated even at time of publish. Automate building inventory specifications for your applications and monitor all those dependencies for known vulnerabilities and license issues.

security

Security automation

A typical web application involves a lot of code in many layers and manually keeping it secure requires in depth knowledge in all of those layers and lots of maintenance. To increase your chances of keeping it secure you could utilize automation. There are a lot of tools available for helping with security automation and it’s a pretty big task to sift through them to find good ones. There are lots and lots of companies selling security tools who wants you on their hook.

security

Cost of microservices

Microservices are great; they’re fun to build and run. You’ll have lots of interesting new problems to tackle. That does however also mean that you’ll need to be reaping quite a bit of benefits from it for it to be a reasonable business choice. So what are the costs? what are the benefits? Interesting problems The associated technical problems are very interesting, which will likely help with both recruitment and keeping those developers from being bored out of their minds and quitting (unless you have interesting business problems).

architecture, microservices

Running dotnet containers in kubernetes

There are some caveats to running dotnet in containers. You might expect that the docker images you pulled from Microsoft’s container registry were checked for vulnerabilities and prepared to run in a containerized environment. If you’ve gone with defaults and don’t have strict rules on your cluster you’ll have an image configured to run alone on a server (which is not a usual setup in a containerized environment) that is also full of known vulnerabilities even when fresh.

dotnet, docker, security, performance

Hugo performance optimizations

To have a silky smooth start you’ll need any code that affects layout to be included in the first render. Ideally you should fit all HTML and CSS needed by first render within 14KB (search for TCP slow start to dig deeper). Size of images needs to be predetermined so that rendering them won’t affect layout. There shouldn’t be any JS that affect layout either. User first/Content first The reason users come to your site is to consume your content (read your posts, buy your product or whatever).

hugo, performance

Switching blog engine to Hugo

Will this blog be entirely meta? a blog about a blog? Who knows? :) A collection of notes and thoughts from switching from Gatsby to Hugo, why I did it and a bit of comparison. Why? The fact that Gatsby included tons of javascript for pretty much no functionality bothered me and I wanted to try something else. Hugo seemed like a good choice. It’s popular, supposedly really fast and seemed to do what I wanted it to and not much else, meaning it should be simple.

hugo

Getting a blog the hard way

The hard way is a path focused on learning, you should follow/replicate this if your aim is gaining knowledge. This post will serve as an overview, while going into a bit more details for sections where there’s no separate post planned. Expect a lot of deep dives searching, especially if you do it before the detailed posts are available. If you’re more interested in the end result, follow these steps instead:

terraform, kubernetes, baremetal