I’ve been a fan of RSS for a couple years now. What I like most is that feed reader software gives agency to the user. This can feel like unwanted friction at the beginning: your feed may start out blank and the burden is on you to fill it. But agency is what most modern social media sites lack. You deserve to read...

In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the official U.S. time reference. NIST distributes this reference to enable all sorts of applications from meteorology to GPS satellites. Programmers are probably most familiar with distributing time using the network time...

Computer clock synchronization is a complicated process, requiring protocols like NTP and a specialized server to answer requests. In this post I explore a “serverless” method, which relies on widely available CDNs to distribute time. It’s the serverless time servers we didn’t realize we already had. If you're...

figure { padding-left: 3em; } blockquote { border-left: 0.2em solid grey; padding: 0.2em 1em 0.2em; margin: 2em; } I’ve recently started building a WordPress plugin, which is my first WordPress and PHP-based project. I’ve programmed in a lot of different languages and platforms over the last twenty years, so picking...

figure { padding-left: 3em; } Many software developers feel we are at a source control inflection point. GitHub has reigned for over fifteen years, and we may be in the early days of an exodus. Developers have become increasingly disappointed with GitHub’s service, features, and overall direction. Blame is often...

blockquote { border-left: 0.2em solid #77d; padding: 0.2em 0.8em; margin: 3em; } This blog post explores FeedLand.com, an RSS feed reader with unique social elements. The goal of FeedLand is to make news a social thing, following the pattern of social media apps, but using open formats and protocols. — Getting...

blockquote { font-style: italic; } Time is one of those things that is significantly harder to deal with than you’d naively expect. Its common in computing to assume that computers know the current time. After all, there are protocols like NTP for synchronizing computer clocks, and they presumably work well and are...

When social media first entered my life, it came with a promise of connection. Facebook connected college-aged adults in a way that was previously impossible, helping to shape our digital generation. Social media was our super-power and we wielded it to great effect. Yet social media today is a noisy, needy, mental...

This post is part of a collection on UUIDs. Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) are handy tool for a distributed systems architect. The provide a method by which a distributed system can generate IDs without meaningful risk of duplicates. These tools are very widely used and do their job quite well. This post...

I’ve been getting back into blogging and am happy to share that my next group of blog posts will be a collection. When I write I often end up with a massive amount of content. I have a hard time keeping posts focused on a single theme; writing is thinking and there’s just so many fun angles to ponder! As a post is...

This post is part of a collection on UUIDs. What is IDOR? Indirect Object Reference (IDOR) occurs when a resource can be accessed directly by its ID even when the user does not have proper authorization to access it. IDOR is a common mistake when using a separate service for storing files, such as a publicly...

thead td { font-weight: bold; } th, td { padding: 0.5em; } table { text-align: left; padding-bottom: 3em; } td:nth-child(1) { text-align: right; } I downloaded the Tranco list of top domain names and ran DNS MX lookups to detect mail servers. I used the top 100,000 domain names, which should be a reasonably sample...