Thoughts, tutorials, and tales from the digital frontier. Lessons learned and wisdom shared.
When I finally tracked down the company holding a client's domain, I expected a fight to prove I had any right to it. Instead they handed it over, no questions asked. That should have been a relief. It was the most alarming part of the whole thing.
Read moreSecond in the legacy-code series. I wanted to write one test and couldn't, because testing one piece meant standing up the whole app. On why "add tests later" is a lie until you carve seams, and why splitting a monolith isn't tidiness.
Read moreYou rent it. And the whole thing runs on a renewal you probably never see. Here's how it works, and how to make sure the name your business runs on is actually in your hands.
Read moreFirst in a three-part series on cleaning up legacy code. A bug that compiled clean and broke nothing until a page loaded in a browser, because the data structure at its centre had no type and no owner. On implicit contracts, and why the compiler can't save you from one.
Read moreA client lost her email for a week because a company she'd never heard of owned her domain. Here's what she was never told, in plain terms, and the one thing to check on your own setup.
Read moreThe scariest security holes aren't clever, they're doors with no lock. On why authorization is where you'll actually bleed, why you can never trust the client, and the boring hygiene that stops most breaches before they start.
Read moreA client got locked out of the account they needed to log into, in order to fix the thing that locked them out. The email they signed in with lived inside the very thing they were trying to reach. Here's how the loop forms, and how to stay out of it.
Read moreYou already know you should write tests. The skill nobody teaches is writing ones that earn their keep, instead of a wall of green that protects nothing. On testing behaviour not implementation, why brittle tests are worse than none, and why "hard to test" is the design talking.
Read moreYou paid someone to build it. That doesn't always mean you have it. Here's what "having the code" really means, and how to check that you do.
Read moreYou're three weeks into a two-week task, nothing has closed, and you've started to suspect the problem is you. It probably isn't. It's that you were handed something with no edges, and you can't finish what has no edges. Here's how to give it some.
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