Bienvenue! Welcome!
My goal is to help you work faster.
I must speak and teach until I hear 10 people say, "That thing you taught me? I used it! And it saved me time!"
(Ahem ... although maybe blogging slower than I'd hoped. Ugh, coders' repetitive stress injury.)
So check out the tutorials. Play with code. Tell me about your triumphs.
Infrastructure as code tool types
06 Oct 2025
Lately, I’ve been studying industry-standard taxonomies for categorizing the many types of tool that a company needs if its wants to modernize delivering and managing servers using “infrastructure as code.”
So far, I’m at 15 categories.
Note: my examples are probably pretty inaccurate. I’m not a sysadmin, I’ve just been researching with GenAI and picking sysadmins’ brains, and potentially not very effectively. Please take this post with a grain of salt.
Continue ReadingNotes from Designing Content Authoring Experiences
03 Oct 2025
I work in tech. That means that for friends and family, I sometimes find myself fixing printers and making business web sites. Greg Dunlap’s new book “Designing Content Authoring Experiences” is a resource I wish I’d had available to me over the last two decades.
Continue ReadingLook, ma, I'm a language teacher!
08 Aug 2025
I shared yesterday’s LLM prompts for requirements analysis and project scoping post with a friend, and they said:
“You got to teach languages this week!”
I teared up, and nearly dropped what I was holding, when I read that comment.
Continue ReadingLLM-assisted requirements analysis and scoping
07 Aug 2025
- Q: How do you eat an elephant?
- A: One bite at a time.
- Q: How do you pick the first bite?
- A: Like this (keep reading).
E2E and Synthetic Testing Considered Harmful
01 Aug 2025
“End-to-end test automation and synthetic monitoring considered harmful” – was I clickbaitey enough to get your attention? 😉
Continue ReadingFrontend automated testing demystifier
07 Jul 2025
When it comes to authoring automated test code for web application frontends, it’s easy to get confused about what kinds of test go where in the “testing pyramid” and how to implement them – especially since all four levels of the “testing pyramid” potentially ask the question: “does this HTML/DOM element exist in this condition?”.
Continue ReadingCan usability testing be automated?
07 Jul 2025
Is there a place for browser automation (e.g. Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer, Cypress) in the art of “usability testing” (à la Don’t Make Me Think)? Or should 100% of usability testing always execute on the platform known as “humans”? 😉
Continue ReadingWhat's the deal with IBM WebSphere Application Server?
05 Jun 2025
When I make a web site, the programming language I choose is typically Node.js (a flavor of JavaScript that can run on a server operating system’s (“OS”) command line (“CLI”), rather than needing to run inside of a web browser). I’ve played around a bit with Python, C# (via .NET), PHP (via WordPress), and Ruby (via Jekyll), but that’s about it. Despite years of Java-like programming experience via Salesforce’s Apex, I’ve never built a web site from scratch using Java.
Continue ReadingWhy use Ansible for infrastructure as code?
04 Jun 2025
Q: Why use frameworks like Ansible for infrastructure as code (“IaC”) efforts? Why are there ever situations when people use it instead of just writing shell scripts like Bash or PowerShell?
Continue ReadingWindows Firewall and BrowserStack Local
03 Jun 2025
For some weird reason, Windows (at least on my computer) doesn’t like to let the BrowserStackLocal.exe “binary” file doesn’t like to do its job unless I explicitly add a rule to Windows Defender Firewall letting that .exe file make outbound TCP connections over port 443.
