Several weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about how horrible it is to have to deal with the various password restrictions websites use. Of course, that post was influenced by Jeff Atwood’s post, Password Rules are Bullshit. While writing the post, I did some research on what makes a good password. And after writing it, I spent several weeks thinking about my own password management strategies.

I love stories about hunting down interesting bugs. I find things like left-pad breaking the internet, cloudbleed, and the sleep bug in Eve Online extraordinarily interesting.

Jeff Atwood wrote a post on Coding Horror today calling out bullshit password rules. And he’s dead on. Password rules, as most sites implement them today, are not improving security. They might actually be hurting it. Even NIST agrees.

With the rapid growth Docker is experiencing, it seems like everyone is trying to learn how to use the technology. In fact, I've invested many over the last year in teaching myself to use Docker. When I was just starting out, I spent a lot of time searching for the quickest, easiest way to learn.

One of my friends and colleagues writes for the Project Management for Developers blog. He recently wrote an article about the importance of testing. I want to respond to his blog post and provide some additional insight into testing from a developer perspective.

My last post was about using Jekyll as a podcasting platform. Now, I want to talk about how I set up automatic deployments with Jekyll. I’m deploying to a Dreamhost server, but the principles I applied should work for most servers that provide ssh access.

I recently did some volunteer work to upgrade the website for a podcast. I chose to re-write the site from scratch, but needed to migrate all of the existing content. After some research, I determined that Jekyll fit our needs best because:

Chromebooks are becoming more popular these days, and their simplicity is something that really appeals to me. I wanted a Chromebook, but not so much that I wanted to spend a lot of money to buy one. At the same time, I had an old 2007 MacBook lying around that was becoming nearly unusable because it was so slow. The version of macOS it was running was outdated, and I didn’t want to spend money on an upgrade for such a slow computer. So… I turned it into a Chromebook!

Vim Refcard on Github

I’m a huge fan of reference cards like the one Emacs provides. In fact, I think that a good reference card is probably the best way to learn a new software program. Whether it’s Vim or anything else.

Mint.com has always done a great job of showing me where I spent my money last week or last month, but until recently I was never able to figure out how to use it to tell me if I could afford to buy that new pair of shoes. To be really effective, a budget has to easily show me if I can afford to buy something I want.

I wanted to modify an old boom box so it could play my iPod with an auxiliary cable. It turned out really well, and it wasn’t too difficult to complete. Check it out!

When I searched for loft bed plans online, I didn’t find any freely available plans that I liked. I decided to make my own plans for a wooden loft bed, and I’m making these plans available for free. These plans may be used and redistributed freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License .

Nathan Witt and I won the bronze medal at SkillsUSA Nationals for 3D Animation in 2008. The challenge was to create an animation that modeled a given picture of a warehouse and showed something that couldn’t be seen in the original photo. See some of our renderings below.

I created this Suzuki GSXR model using Autodesk Maya as part of the Digital Evolutions 3D modeling & animation program at Smoky Hill High School.

This is my senior demo reel for the Digital Evolutions 3D modeling & animation program at Smoky Hill High School.

I created this 3D Nissan Skyline model during my junior year in the Digital Evolutions program at Smoky Hill High School.