Watch, Read, Listen
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SMS is great for flight notifications, appointment reminders, and delivery updates. But for conversations with friends and family, it’s time to move on. I love text messaging. It’s one of those technologies that works so well we’ve almost forgotten how remarkable it is. Your airline can tell you your flight is delayed. Your doctor’s office…
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If you use GitHub to build and deploy software, take a few minutes to understand Gheist. You do not need to be a security specialist. You need to know what your automation can access, who can change it, and what evidence would tell you someone has abused that access. Gheist is a campaign that uses…
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Last week a critical PHP vulnerability dropped. That same week, I realized the WordPress image my blog runs on was never going to get another update. Those two facts together changed what “patching” meant for me, and they probably change it for you too if you host WordPress on AWS Lightsail. Here’s what happened, what…
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We are the kings of the code. That may sound a little grandiose, but consider what happens when we use AI agents to develop software. We issue instructions, delegate responsibilities, establish standards, and expect our agents to carry out our intentions. We may not personally write every line of code, but every line written in…
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AI is becoming an extraordinary programming partner. But sometimes its eagerness to help is exactly why we need to pay attention. I was working on a software project recently with Cursor, my AI-powered development environment. We’d been developing a feature on a Git branch called 075-dev-start-lan-login-hardening, and it was time to move on to the…
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If you’ve been coding with AI, you’ve probably heard this instruction from you AI: “Put the password in an environment variable.” That advice is usually better than hard-coding the password directly into your source code. But it is incomplete—and sometimes dangerously reassuring. Environment variables are a delivery mechanism for secrets. They are not a vault,…
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Your backup plan is only as good as the last time you have actually done a restore. I spent eight years as Director of Engineering for a healthcare company in Boston. Once a year, we held “Disaster Day,” an exercise that started after 9/11. Our office was near the USS Constitution, as well as a…
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The future will be divided between people who use AI to accelerate judgment and those who use AI to avoid judgment.
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I’ve spent my career building software, leading engineering teams, designing systems, and figuring out how technology can solve useful problems. I still like being close to the code. These are some of the projects I’ve built or am actively developing. They range from full-stack applications and cloud infrastructure to AI-assisted engineering tools, browser security, mobile…
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Linux permissions are good at controlling who can read and write a file, but they are not always as good at protecting against deletion as people assume. If you have an important file that should remain readable but be extremely difficult to delete accidentally, Linux gives you a few useful layers of protection. You can…