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I, like many of you, am wrestling with how to best apply AI to my career as a software engineer. As we continue to adopt to AI-assisted coding, there is becoming more and more evidence that we may be limiting the ability of our future selves to own and support software systems. In my last post, I made the argument that by writing this blog by hand, it forced a deeper understanding of the material, and resulted in something I was proud to call my own. Leveraging AI for writing removed both of these benefits, and stripped the satisfaction I get from having a blog in the first place. ...

This blog has been a part of my life for over fifteen years ago. When I first started, I was inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s article Don’t End The Week With Nothing. This post left a memorable impression on 20-something me who had yet to consider what work really was — trading time and (sometimes) skill for money. You work for a week, collect your paycheck on Friday, and then you and the company are even. If you are happy settling for even, that’s great. But then how can you get ahead? What would it take to finish a week with more than a break-even trade of time for money? Here I will quote Patrick verbatim: ...

In an attempt to move more of my music workflow off of my Mac and onto real hardware, I recently bought a set of used Korg Volca synthesizers for experimenting with synthesis and drum programming. I also have an Akai MPK mini plus that I mainly used for controlling Logic Pro that I wanted to repurpose for controlling the Volca synths through the MIDI out on the Akai MPK mini. Since I couldn’t find any existing documentation of the process, I thought I would write it down myself in hopes of helping the next person working through this setup. This set of steps should be easily adaptable to both the MPK mini IV controller and other MIDI controllable synths or devices. ...

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. Before the late 1970s, secure communication largely meant symmetric encryption. This included the complexity that comes with maintaining and sharing secrets every time two parties wished to communicate. RSA changed that by showing that encryption and decryption could use different keys, making secure communication practical for applications across the Internet. ...

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. Modern cryptography relies heavily on number theory. One of the simplest but most important tools in the number theorist’s toolkit is the Euclidean algorithm. This algorithm, and its extension, the extended Euclidean algorithm, form the basis for practical cryptographic operations such as modular inversion. This blog post walks through both algorithms, with an explanation of why they are important to public key cryptography. ...

When deploying microservices on Kubernetes, how many replicas should I run? Intuition suggests that two replicas is enough to give you high availability; if one pod dies, the other keeps the service online. Industry standard, however, suggests running three replicas. Why is this the case? In this post, I will explain reasons to choose three replicas over two, and some best practices based on the realities specific to Kubernetes. The Math Behind Preferring Three Replicas The suggestion to run three replicas is often followed by hand-wavy “because it is more resilient”. Rather than rely on intuition, let’s try putting some numbers behind the reasoning. ...

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. When the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was introduced in the 1970s, it was considered a solid block cipher. But DES has one major flaw by today’s standards — a small key space. With only 56 bits of key material, DES can be brute-forced with modern hardware by checking every possible key value. Once it was apparent that DES was no longer secure and could be brute-forced, a natural idea to extend the life of DES without resorting to an entirely new algorithm was to increase the size of the key space by encrypting the data twice with two different keys. The hope was that doubling the encryption operation with different keys would increase the difficulty of brute force attacks. ...

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. Last time we explored the Data Encryption Standard (DES), and how its Feistel network structure worked. We also saw why DES eventually became obsolete: its 56-bit key size was simply too small in the face of modern computing power. To replace DES, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held a public competition in the late 1990s. Fifteen different algorithms were submitted from around the world. Over the course of several years, this field was narrowed down to five finalists, each carefully analyzed by cryptographers. Finally, in 2000, an algorithm called Rijndael, created by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, was selected as the winner. This became the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which has since become the most widely used block cipher in the world. It is used everywhere: encrypting TLS traffic in your browser, securing Wi-Fi connections, and protecting classified government data. ...

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is based upon the principles of a substitution-permutation network that we learned about in the last post in this series. The design of DES is based on the principles of Feistel ciphers, which are a particular configuration of a substitution-permutation network developed by Horst Feistel at IBM. ...

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. A block cipher is a type if cipher that combines an encryption/decryption algorithm that works on blocks of data with a mode of operation that details the techniques to process sequences of data blocks. While many different block cipher algorithms exist, they all share a common structural design: they apply a series of transformations — known as rounds — that iteratively manipulate the input data. These rounds consist of small, repeatable operations that gradually transform the plaintext into ciphertext. ...