pSYoniK - Software, Hardware and Tech

17 March, 2022

Some thoughts on the UK Online Safety Bill and an analysis of the issues that it can cause.

23 February, 2022

Every online purchase nowadays requires an email address. Every organisation, company, form or review left online asks for your email address. This dark-pattern has become so ubiquitous that we are domesticated and we will gleefully provide it. However, just because someone asks for your email address, doesn’t mean that they can protect it and along with it, access to a host of other accounts you might have. With this in mind, I will detail some of these risks as well as provide some ways of mittigating them.

Mediocre – Don’t Look Up and The Matrix Resurrections

28 December, 2021

Before I get started, if you haven’t seen the movies and do not want spoilers, stop reading now. To sum up my thoughts on the two movies: they are bad, perfect examples of everything wrong with the current artistic environment. They are representative of an industry that has been going downhill for a few decades now, and not because streaming is taking over or because of piracy, but because it’s producing content instead of art, because it puts monetary value above creative expression.

Simple Website Analytics Using CaddyServer Logs

15 December, 2021

I previously discussed my recent change towards digital minimalism and as part of that transition, I moved towards a static website and removed any external services that I felt weren’t adding value. I also wanted to get some sort of basic analytics, but all the solutions I found were adding unnecessary bloat and for my use case, I didn’t need anything too fancy since I don’t use that analytics information to sell you something or target content. With that in mind I decided to develop a small console application that parses the Caddy server logs generated by this page and outputs the result to the console.

Azure Storage Backup and Delete Tool - Tutorial

3 June, 2021

I always wanted to try my hand at writing a programming tutorial so this is my first attempt at a one. If you’re strictly interested in the code, you can find it on my Gitlab repo. Before you download and run it, keep in mind that it does contain destructive commands and bulk operations. This can cause data loss and incur high transfer charges depending on the location of the storage accounts you’re transfering to and from. It has no error handling and unless you know what the code does, it can yield strange results. However, for me it doubled as the learning ground for Azure Storage (AS). If you’re interested in an overview of the code itself and some thoughts on the current state of Azure libraries made by Microsoft, keep scrolling.

Estimating development tasks, projects and effort

1 April, 2021

How long will… it take to build this new feature for our client? What do you say? 3 days? A week? Two weeks? A month? Come on, you have to be able to give me an estimate! That long? No, surely it can be done faster! I have entire Excel spreadsheets color coded that tell me otherwise. I have seen thousands of developers finish this task on time in extremely complex projects! I think it can be done in 2 days and you can wrap up the documentation while the client takes it for a spin. Testing? Oh don’t worry about it and if you don’t have time for documentation, that’s ok, it’s only a small feature anyway. I look forward to your response. Kind regards, someone

Migrating my website and digital minimalism

25 February, 2021

Over the past few months I went on a spree of sorts. This wasn’t a spending spree or focused on anything consumption oriented, but rather the other way around. I decided that I had (still have, if I’m honest…) too large of a digital footprint. Too many apps, too many accounts and too much tech to the point where it was decreasing the quality of my experience

The importance of debugging

16 January, 2021

It took some time since my previous post but I’ve been busy doing a host of other things, however, I wanted to wrap up on the previous post on the importance of debugging, reading the manual and incomplete guides. This post will focus a bit on debugging, more as a reminder to myself and maybe as a helper to others and on how to debug .NET Core apps deployed to Azure.

The importance of error logging, debugging and complete guides

17 November, 2020

One of the things that they never discussed during my courses was the importance of debugging, error logging and how to drill down through those errors. No one seemed to mention that some guides that I would later on read as a developer, might make assumptions regarding my knowledge, the setup I had already completed and the completeness of my background knowledge.

Time and the new meta of working from home

21 July, 2020

Wow, did the past few months just fly by. It seems only a couple of days ago that I was wrapping up some work for school to get that neural networks coursework out of the way and bam, it’s four months later and I’m studying them again, this time though for exams. Things changed, massively so, in these months and each time I wanted to slow down and take a deep breath to write down my thoughts, I never got the chance. But I do now!

Neural Networks

9 March, 2020

I’m sure that by now everyone has heard about neural networks, deep learning, AI, machine learning and any of the other 304875 new hot things that everyone should do and use in their projects/work/house/etc. After spending the better part of the last month or so working my way through courseworks surrounding neural networks, I came away with a few thoughts for myself (future me hi!).

Solving big problems one at a time

17 January, 2020

I was greeted a few days ago by a quick message underneath my search box asking me if I was up for a challenge. I didnt’ take a screenshot at the time, but the idea stands and the message was similar to the one below (the image is taken from this Medium article about Google Foobar and all credit goes to the original source).