This post contains a few details on implementing a Quick Access Device Control for Android 11+. As of writing (Jan ’21), this is a relatively new feature and there aren’t many support resources out there for it. To help address this in some small part, here are a few gotchas I stumbled on while implementing …
Long build times for software applications can be a significant business cost. Every minute that software developers spend waiting for the software to build is almost* pure waste. When this is multiplied across a number of developers, each running a number of builds per day, it quickly adds up. To make this cost more tangible, …
I was recently exposed to the idea of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) through Twitter. I’ve struggled to wrap my head around them ever since. What does it mean that people are willing to pay millions to own a Tweet or JPEG? How does that sentence make any sense? And why do the concept of NFTs reliably …
It’s interesting how learning is sometimes like travel. At the end of the journey, you end up back where you started, only with a broadened perspective. Trivial example: code comments. As a new programmer, I commented my code extensively. This was probably to compensate for my difficulties in reading code. It also allowed me to …
To show a specific selection of your posts in the sidebar, contrary to what some top-ranking search results will tell you, you don’t need to install yet another spammy WP plugin or write any HTML. All you need is the standard Text widget. Here’s how to add your own “selected posts” section. Steps: Go to …
How to Display Selected WordPress Posts in a Sidebar (no plugins or HTML) Read More »
The Law of Conservation of Testing Effort: Like energy, the total testing burden for a piece of software is constant. It can’t be added to nor reduced, only transformed. However, the cost to your business (in terms of time, money and trust) of these different forms is variable. Here’s an example. Let’s say I’ve been …
Node.js’s built-in crypto library lets you verify the signature of a file with very few lines of (Typescript) code: What if the file is large and/or you’re running on a low-memory device? This might be the case if you’re writing a firmware updater to run on an embedded device e.g. a Raspberry Pi Zero. In …
It’s coming into summer here in New Zealand. Around this time every year, the strawberry farm near our house opens for the season, selling trays of fresh strawberries and real fruit ice cream. On a hot Sunday afternoon a few weekends ago, my partner and I were driving home from some errands. Her brother had …
What Tech Startups Can Learn From a Strawberry Farm Read More »
Here’s an unavoidable fact: the software project you’re working on has some flaws that no one knows about. Not you, your users, nor anyone in your team. These could be anything from faulty assumptions in the UI to leaky abstractions in the architecture or an error-prone release process. Given enough time, these flaws will be …
Multicast DNS service discovery, aka. Zeroconf or Bonjour, is a useful means of making your node app (e.g. multiplayer game or IoT project) easily discoverable to clients on the same local network. The node_mdns module worked out-of-the-box on my Mac. Unfortunately things weren’t as straightforward on a node-alpine docker container running on Raspberry Pi Zero, …
Publishing your node service with DNS-SD/mDNS from an Alpine Linux docker container Read More »