Tech debt: a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution.^source

Research institutions often suffer from the effects of technical debt that slow processing, lead to inflexible procedures and pipelines, and ultimately limit the potential for forward progress in high speed academic environments. This article covers three key ways that researchers can begin to tackle the issue of tech debt.

As you may or may not have heard, the CIA has recently had a major document trove released about the works of CCI in Langley. There are lots of analyses of the technical aspects (including on the leak homepage).

Politics aside, I’m mainly enjoying seeing the internals of a different developer/company/government culture — some of them are hilarious, some of them are laughably relatable (who doesn’t have notes scrawled somewhere about handling git submodules so they don’t have to hit StackOverflow), and some of them are reminders that software devs gonna software dev, no matter who signs the paycheck!

This is a little half hour project I built before bed since I was itching to code something that wasn’t horribly frustrating (thanks, Compilers class…).

This replaces text as you type with user-defined replacements _a la iOS. It’s simple but super nice if you prefer emojis or use text shortcuts (‘shrug’ becomes ¯_(ツ)/¯  on my system).

Github. Chrome Store. Fork me hard.

A groundbreaking new study linking gamma frequency photostrobing to reduction of amyloid plaque load in the brain which can cause Alzheimer’s.

I wrote a Chrome extension that strobes the screen at a custom intensity and frequency to aim to replicate gamma frequency induce amyloid plaque reduction. The extension options page allows for custom change in the flash opacity and frequency. Default is 10% opacity, 40Hz.

Download from the Chrome store or fork me on GitHub.

I finished some homework early so I took ten minutes to spin out a piece of code I actually wrote as part of a class project (COEN164 shout out; thanks to Evan Paul for the praise that spurred me into repo-fying this) into a proper open source repo.

I’ve often been frustrated with super heavy and feature-rich testing harnesses that I have to spend 20 minutes looking at before I can even write a test. **μHarness **aims to solve that with an ulta-low-frills system that serially runs functions and compares their output to an expected value; nothing fancy in the slightest went into the making of this.

Short and sweet, but lots of fun, my end of summer project was a digital will dissemination system as well as a cute little life clock for myself. It was a nice way to stretch my legs after the FOSS moratorium I was under while at FB and handy to get something done that’s been on my todo list for a while (now that I’m apparently an adult or something…).

After finals at SCU and now on the tail end of a few health issues, I’m happy to say I’m settling into my internship at Facebook! I’m working on the Systems Engineering team which deals with infrastructure deployment and administration from a software side – kernels, OOB work, and the like. It’s been like drinking from a firehose but I love it! I also got to open Mark Zuckerberg’s water bottle for him on account of his broken arm and he showed up in my fanboying status to comment on it – highlight of the internship right there.

After a leisurely day, an idea struck fast and hard – four hours later, Breakbot was born.

Breakbot simplifies fuzzing and pen-testing by putting disruptive strings and naughty unicode just a click away – no more googling for Zalgo or trying to copy a zero-width character. Breakbot is a click-paste solution that puts bad strings on your clipboard quickly and easily. It’s on [GitHub][1] and the Chrome Store (soon, I hope – all the badness (and probably the EICAR string) in it has got the extension stuck in review… no surprise).

Today’s afternoon project before I start my real work: scriptBot. prep.py will process subtitle files (in SRT format), take in some Twitter credentials and interval data, and then build a file that tweet.py can take in, which will tweet out a random line from the movie on the given interval… it’s set and forget cultural relevancy that really allows you to put out high quality content.

And now I guess I should probably do the real work that pays for my college education.

I got tired of typing the emoji shrug by googling it and copying the first result, so I wrote a bookmarklet to inject it into the active input field.

You can also drag this hyperlink to your bookmarks bar, and click it when you’re focused in a textbox you want to inject it into: [¯_(ツ)_/¯][2]

Doesn’t work on facebook comments because they’re actually editable