Watch, Read, Listen
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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…
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A Monument to Human Civilization There are very few opportunities left to build something that could still matter a thousand years from now. This is one of them. The proposal is simple to describe and almost impossible to forget: Build a full-scale replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, hollow on the inside, and turn…
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How we wired up live browser debugging across a secure LAN of Linux boxes, discovered our networking layer had a bug hiding under another bug, and why letting Claude drive PowerShell directly turned a day of round-trips into a few minutes of commands. The problem we were actually trying to solve This wasn’t a networking…
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We have spent decades making HTTPS better. Today, when I connect to my bank, Google, Amazon, or almost any other major website, my browser performs a remarkably sophisticated series of cryptographic checks. It verifies the site’s TLS certificate, checks that the certificate chains back to a trusted Certificate Authority, makes sure the certificate matches the…
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You hover your inspector over a tiny icon. You see background-position: -832px -47px. You blink. You scroll to the top of the stylesheet and find a single PNG weighing 4.2 megabytes. You close the inspector and never speak of it again. To the young web developer: you will never know this pain. Nor this beauty.…