Just 4 Programmers

I did a blog post many years ago reminding folks that The Internet is not a Black Box . Virtually nothing is hidden from you. The same is true for your computer, whether it runs Linux, Mac, or Windows. Here's something that happened today at lunch. I was testing a local DNS Server (more on this on Thursday) and I started it up...and it didn't work. In order to test a DNS server on Windows, you can go to the command line and run "nslookup" then use the command "server 1.1.1.1" where 1.1.1.1 is the DNS server you'd like to try out. Go ahead and try it now. Run cmd.exe or powershell.exe and then run "nslookup" and then type any domain name. You should get an IP address. Given that I was trying to run a DNS Server on localhost:53 (Port 53 is where DNS usually hangs out, just like Port 80 is where Web Servers (HTTP) hang out and 443 is where Secured Web Servers (HTTPS) usually are) I should be able to do this. I'm trying to send DNS reques...

I recently stumbled upon https://accessibilityinsights.io . There's both a Chrome/ Edge extension and a Windows app, both designed to make it easier to find and fix accessibility issues in your websites and apps. The GitHub for the Accessibility Insights extension for the web is at https://github.com/Microsoft/accessibility-insights-web and they have three trains you can get on: Canary (released continuously) Insider (on feature completion) Production (after validation in Insider) It builds on top of the Deque Axe core engine with a really fresh UI. The "FastPass" found these issues with my podcast site in seconds - which kind of makes me feel bad, but at least I know what's wrong! However, the most impressive visualization in my opinion was the Tab Stop test! See below how it draws clear numbered line segments as you Tab from element. This is a brilliant way to understand exactly how someone without a mouse would move through your site. I can easily s...

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired and now has a new book out called " Coders ." "Along the way, Coders thoughtfully ponders the morality and politics of code, including its implications for civic life and the economy. Programmers shape our everyday behavior: When they make something easy to do, we do more of it. When they make it hard or impossible, we do less of it." I'm quoted in the book and I talk about how I've struggled with context-switching. Here is TechTarget's decent definition of Context Switching : A context switch is a procedure that a computer's CPU (central processing unit) follows to change from one task (or process) to another while ensuring that the tasks do not conflict. Effective context switching is critical if a computer is to provide user-friendly multitasking. However, human context switching is the procedure we all have to go through to switch...

Per Wikipedia, "In mathematics , a binary relation ... is transitive if ... element a is related to an element b and b is related to an element c then a is also related to c. " Per Me, if I am cool with you, and you are cool with your friend, then I'm cool with your friend. I've decided this is The Transitive Property of Friendship . As I try to mentor more and more people and help folks Level Up in tech, I'm realizing how important it is to # BeTheLuck for someone else. This is something that YOU can do - volunteer at local schools, forward that resume for your neighbor, give a Warm Intro to a friend of a friend. A lot of one's success can be traced back to hard work and being prepared for opportunities to present themselves, but also to Warm Intros. Often you'll hear about someone who worked hard in school, studied, did well, but then got a job because "their parent knew a person who worked at x." That's something that is hard to re...

AdaFruit makes an adorable tiny little Circuit Python IoT device called the PyPortal that's just about perfect for the kids - and me. It a little dakBoard , if you will - a tiny totally programmable display with Wi-Fi and  lots of possibilities and sensors. Even better, you can just plug it in over USB and edit the code.py file directly on the drive that will appear. When you save code.py the device soft reboots and runs your code. I've been using Visual Studio Code to program Circuit Python and it's become my most favorite IoT experience so far because it's just so easy. The "Developer's Inner Loop" of code, deploy, debug is so fast. As you may know, I use a Dexcom CGM (Continuous Glucose Meter) to manage my Type 1 Diabetes. I feed the data every 5 minutes into an instance of the Nightscout Open Source software hosted in Azure. That gives me a REST API to my own body. I use that REST API to make "glanceable displays" where I - or my family...

Thousands of years ago your ancestors, and myself, were using DOS (or CMD) pressing F7 to get this amazing little ASCII box to pop up to pick commands they'd typed before. When I find myself in cmd.exe I use F7 a lot. Yes, I also speak *nix and Yes, Ctrl-R is amazing and lovely and you're awesome for knowing it and Yes, it works in PowerShell. Here's the tragedy. Ctrl-R for a reverse command search works in PowerShell because of a module called PSReadLine . PSReadLine is basically a part of PowerShell now and does dozens of countless little command line editing improvements. It also - not sure why and I'm still learning - unknowingly blocks the glorious F7 hotkey. If you remove PSReadLine (you can do this safely, it'll just apply to the current session) Remove-Module -Name PSReadLine Why, then you get F7 history with a magical ASCII box back in PowerShell. And as we all know, 4k 3D VR be damned, impress me with ASCII if you want a developer's heart . ...

It's super easy to get started with .NET Core and/or ASP.NET Core with Docker. If you have Docker installed you don't need to install anything to try out .NET Core, of course. To run a little .NET Core console app: docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/samples:dotnetapp And the result: latest: Pulling from dotnet/core/samples Hello from .NET Core! ...SNIP... **Environment** Platform: .NET Core OS: Linux 4.9.125-linuxkit #1 SMP Fri Sep 7 08:20:28 UTC 2018 To run a quick little ASP.NET Core website just: docker run -it --rm -p 8000:80 --name aspnetcore_sample mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/samples:aspnetapp And here it is running on localhost:8000 You can also host ASP.NET Core Images with Docker over HTTPS to with this image, or run ASP.NET Core apps in Windows Containers . Note that Microsoft teams are now publishing container images to the MCR (Microsoft Container Registry) so they can use the Azure CDN and pull faster when they are closer to you glo...