When Curiosity Stops Paying Off

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about unprompted curiosity - the idea that the engineers who dig into things without being asked are the ones who end up driving direction. I still believe that.


Learning to Say No

Early in my career, I said yes to everything. Extra project? Sure. Meeting I didn't need to be in? I'll be there. Feature request that didn't quite fit the system? I'll figure it out.


On Unprompted Curiosity

I've been in this industry long enough to watch careers diverge. Two engineers start at roughly the same place - similar skills, similar experience, similar opportunities.


Ziggy URL generator and Webpack

I've been wanting to get ziggy in use at $job for a while now because of its developer quality of life improvements around url generation. I don't want our devs to have to remember to update the ziggy generated routes whenever they update a routes file, so I need something automated in our webpack install.


rip-loop.sh: Ripping a few hundred CDs in a day

Last year after moving to a new house, I decided to finally set up some local backup functionality and found a Synology RS819 for a good price, added some drives to it, and started playing around with it. From there, I decided to finally start ripping all the CDs that I had collected over the years that were taking up space in my office (where they still stand, only because I've conveniently forgotten to move them out to storage...


AWS Lambda and Compression

I've looked online repeatedly for code samples that discuss using gzip compression with AWS Lambdas, specifically with Python code, and I couldn't find any, so I decided to provide this code sample. I'm sure there's things that are missing with it, but this solves my underlying problem and does so in a manner that works well enough.


AWS Cognito User Migration Lambda in Python

We've been tasked with switching our login system from an in-app system to something leveraging AWS Cognito. Doing so requires a migration step which, when done fully through AWS requires some hoops (including an AWS Lambda where the example provided from AWS is a NodeJS Lambda (where we prefer Python Lambdas) so I spent some time rewriting it and thought I'd share for those that are interested.