I’m a developer with a passion for cloud platforms, web development and automation!
I use this blog to write about my interests. They’re usually tech-related, but there’s also the odd music and gaming piece too.
Taking the opportunity to share my listening recommendations from the year past
2021-01-01 // 9 min read // #music
For me, 2020 was a very quiet year. I spent a lot of time at home, and wasn’t out much aside from when I needed to be out. During that time, I found myself drawn to music listening as an escape.
As a way to farewell the year, I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite albums that have come out in the past twelve months.
Building the features I want to see in the world
2020-10-23 // 8 min read // #serverless #vercel
Over the last few months, I’ve started supporting a few content creators I follow through a monthly subscription on Patreon.
Whenever these creators post new content, Patreon notifies me with an email. This works well enough, but I’d rather be using my true love to stay up to date: RSS!
Does Patreon support RSS feeds? My cursory internet searching turns up that they’re only available for podcasters posting audio content.
So if general RSS feeds for Patreon aren’t available, why not make my own?
2020-10-19 // 6 min read // #site
For the last week or so, I’ve been working on a few improvements to this site!
I don’t usually write about this stuff, but I thought it might be interesting to briefly mention a few of the things I’ve done.
I could do it, I didn't stop to think whether it should be done
2020-10-16 // 7 min read // #automation #buildkite #ios-shortcuts
For a while now, I’ve been automatically sending out my newsletter as a part of the deployment process for my website. It’s a great convenience that means I can focus on writing and publishing new content, instead of worrying about generating and delivering actual emails.
In my current setup, I’m able to preview newsletters from my inbox before they’re delivered to my readers. If I think one is good to go, I can hit the big red button to send it out!
While pressing this “big red button” only takes a half-dozen clicks in a web UI, I’d love if it was just that little bit easier on my end. So that’s what I set about improving today!
Leaking sensitive data from the comfort of your phone
2020-10-02 // 3 min read // #privacy
Metadata, or “data about data”, is a useful thing to have.
On the web, it’s great to have access to extra information about a webpage that browsers don’t show through <meta> tags and response headers. When we’re working with filesystems, we might care about when files were created and their access permissions just as much as we might care about their contents.
But at the same time, metadata can also be a cause for concern.
