Corporate environments usually have more (advanced) (network) security measures in place. For developers this means that getting any random package from the internet into the environment (enclave) where the sensitive data lives is impossible, which is a good thing. Let’s agree that security is important and that efforts of it should always be admired, since we cannot get enough people to be security minded. Developers freedom compromized Development is the creation of something new, otherwise you are just building. Read more

For this post we focus on higher education / college / university. Historically Current education comes from a time when: knowledge transfer/sharing was expensive (pre-internet era) knowledge changed slower (pace of innovation has increased) people lived their whole life in the same area Let’s address these topics! Ease of knowledge transfer Before the invention of books … let’s not go there. When everything was done in books, there was a lot of value in aggregated clusters of knowledge, which one could consume (learn). Read more

We all assume you cannot register admin, postmaster or support@yourisp.com, however, a Dutch provider let me do a similar thing. In Dutch we had an old spelling and a new one; pannekoek (old) and pannenkoek (new), which means pancake. So I tried to register klanteservice instead of klantenservice, which was still available! I didn’t look at it for years, my ISP changed its name, making me even catch more emails! Read more

My regular domain registrar did not provide .nl domains, which made me look for Dutch registrars. At one of the cheapest registrars, the price was below 1EU for the first year. However, what if we could have this price for multiple years? Would the form proceed if we changed the value? Now only the checkout, do they validate? Contact registrar After I was able to proceed this checkout, I notified the company. Read more

Investment banking and managing assets generally requires one to make decisions. Research has shown that making decisions based on data is better than gut feeling. We measure the output of our system by the metrics provided and decide and act upon them. But let’s look at the acting part. The old model is to change the business process (variables), wait for some data and see if the change had the desired outcome. Read more

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) enables us to run Linux on a Windows 10 device. Even when developer mode and the windows store are disabled, you can run this when you can start PowerShell as an admin. Ubuntu/Debian/Kali via WSL If we have at least windows 10 1803 (see below), we can install WSL using the following steps: Download your distro (e.g. Ubuntu) as appx here Open PowerShell as Administrator cd C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME\Downloads Add-AppxPackage . Read more

Men In The Middle (MITM) proxies are used in some corporate environments for compliancy. You can spot this in your browser by inspecting the certificate. Sometimes you don’t want people to be able to do eavesdropping, which we can prevent using Nginx. Use the following config: ssl_protocols TLSv1.3; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; Note that this will not work for older browsers like Edge and IE. Chrome works fine. Debugging OpenSSL If you get an error stating no cipher match your Nginx may not have the latest OpenSSL version. Read more

Developers write code in an integrated development environment (IDE), which is usually installed on their workstation. A WebIDE runs in the cloud, allowing one to work from any device that has a browser. In this article we only consider open source products. I’ve used a WebIDE for more than a year now and love it. It has allowed me to use a chromebook now and do everything in the cloud. Read more

After getting kubernetes up and running and the dashboard online we proceed to getting our first service public to the world. When you do not use a load balancer provided by your cloud provider, kubernetes offers you two options for exposing ports: NodePort or using an ingress. Ingress is clearly the way to go, enabling you to have multiple services using the same port (this article explains the difference in more detail). Read more

Kubernetes provides us with a proxy without TLS support or HTTP Basic authentication (BA). Using IP filtering (--accept-hosts) did not work on my VPS either. In this post I’ll show how you can access your dashboard with TLS and basic auth. This post can also be used to get your first k8s running on your Ubuntu machine/VPS. Get your cluster The following steps are based on this tutorial. You should have Ubuntu 16 or higher: Read more