There Are Only Temporary Solutions

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash This is a reflection from an earlier job I had. It was at one of those large enterprises with monthly deploys and a development process documentation taking up 5 meters on a wall. For 8 years, consultants from one of the largest IT companies, had failed to deliver a company-wide identity solution (authentication/authorisation) that fulfilled the requirements. It was emphasised how important is was that this was done right (opposite to fail fast).

Firmware Update Notifications for My Asus Router

Even though there is an app for my Asus RT-AC68U router with the default firmware, it hasn’t worked that well for me and I wanted reliable firmware update notifications. I found that this has been done by others, but still, there are a few steps to go through, so I’m documenting them here. This works for several other Asus router models as well, see the list of supported routers.

Getting a Divorce From SharePoint 💔

In my early days as a consultant this product from Microsoft called SharePoint became popular and customers starting to ask for people who could work with it. As a junior, I jumped onboard and could soon call myself a SharePoint developer, one of the hottest thing in the IT consultant market at the time (around 2007). This specialisation got me into interesting development projects and I learned a lot. What was initially a hurdle (the horrible API), soon became familiar and an advantage for me compared to colleagues in the business that hadn’t got the same exposure to the product.

Integrated Terminal Shortcut in VS Code Opens External Terminal

For quite a while I’ve been slightly annoyed by the behaviour that the keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio Code didn’t open the integrated terminal if I also had an external terminal open, it was switching to that one instead. Googling the problem didn’t help me come closer to an explanation, which I suspected had to do with the language/keyboard specific nature of this issue. As you can see in the image below, the default keyboard shortcut to open the integrated terminal on my machine is Ctrl + ö.

Create Fake Backend with Node Express

The thing I’m most satisfied with in a long time is the introduction of a fake backend for my team’s frontend development. When you have another system that you depend on and that you have no control over, it’s always worth considering if that system can be replaced with a fake version for development. This is especially valuable when this backend system(s) is highly configurable and can be in a lot of different “states” that you cannot control.