API Design Reading List

A friend recently asked if I had any recommended reading on designing APIs in general. I found some time today to dig through my Pinboard, and these are the relevant links I found. Many/most of them are language- or technology-specific, but I think it's useful to read …

Recommended Equifax Breach Resources

I’ve re-typed the same advice and links a few times now for various friends, so in the interest of saving time here‘s a blog post. Quick takeaways: * Equifax's tool for checking whether you were affected has been notoriously flaky. If you’ve ever participated in the …

Failing Actors Reading Series

Brief thoughts on lessons we can learn from Erlang when designing reliable actors in Swift.

Quick ADS-B monitoring on OS X

A quick write-up of a minimal ADS-B monitoring setup, with a standard RTL-SDR receiver and a MacBook.

ALPRs in Ann Arbor

A brief overview of Ann Arbor’s current use of ALPRs.

DRYing up duplicate code into helper functions

We often assume it’s clear what it means to DRY up duplicated code. But it’s worth examining what DRY really means, and why it’s important.

Monitoring aircraft via ADS-B on OS X

I recently set up an ADS-B monitoring rig on a Mac Mini at home. This post documents the process I went through to allow monitoring aircraft and feeding information to several flight tracking websites.

Statically-Typechecked Duck Types in Swift

I present a hypothetical new Swift language feature which would allow something like duck typing in many use cases. This feature would be particularly useful in tests, where currently no good mocking/stubbing solution exists. The solution I propose achieves flexibility while maintaining the safety …

Choosing a Version Number for a CocoaPod with Updated Dependencies

Semantic Versioning generally provides a clear rule for incrementing a library’s version number, but it fails to cover one common case which arises with CocoaPods: how are updates to a pod’s dependencies considered?

Parent-Child Communication in a Coordinator/View Model Application

I received an interesting question via Twitter last week: @cdzombak In the coordinator/MVVM architecture you described on @fatalerrorfm, how do ParentVC communicate with childVC. PC->PVM->Cord->CVM? — Cory Sullivan (@jcsully98) January 12, 2017 It took me a few days to find the time to write …

Fatal Error, Season 2

Season 2 of Fatal Error is back — with weekly episodes and a Patreon campaign.

Fatal Error

Looking back on Fatal Error’s first season.

Why Comcast injecting messages into web traffic is dangerous

Comcast’s practice of messaging customers via content injection provides a beautiful vector for successful phishing attacks.

The hard problem in decentralized social networks

“All that matters is signed data” means that your keys become your identity, and that you manage your social network by curating your collection of public keys. Nobody has come up with a really approachable, usable way of doing that.

Let’s Encrypt vs. iTunes: anatomy of an error delivering Fatal Error

iTunes appears to use Java to fetch podcast feeds, which doesn't trust the root certificate for Let’s Encrypt, the certificate authority Squarespace uses to serve sites via HTTPS.