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  1. Reflection serialization for private internal SDKs

    Mar 3, 2026

    Elyse Holladay, host of the “On Theme: Design Systems in Depth” podcast, had Noelle Lansford on the 2026 predictions episode as they tried to work out what it’d look like for a nondeterministic programming assistant to help you build out of deterministically executable design system component source code libraries and such. I frantically searched a bigger question about private internal SDKs in general (of which a design system component library is one such example):

  2. Wins of the week

    Feb 26, 2026

    I knew I’d been burning the candle at both ends in the first half of this week, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I knew 30 minutes with my boss wasn’t enough to cover it all, though, so I made myself stop and write it down so I could send a recap in an email. Wow, my “full stack” runs the gamut! (My job’s so fun.)

  3. It's hypermobility all the way down

    Feb 12, 2026

    Perhaps I should save this for a more personal blog, but I’ve got decent SEO on this one, and hopefully these notes about hypermobility can help someone else if I post them here. Devon Price recently posted about life at the extremely hypermobile end of the body spectrum. This one’s a little more about the “you don’t read ‘flexible’ to other people and wouldn’t even think you’re ‘hypermobile’ if you hadn’t been told by a professional that you slightly fit that category” end of the spectrum.

  4. Find the Entra security groups a colleague is in

    Feb 5, 2026

    Here’s a little PowerShell script for finding the Microsoft Entra ID security-enabled groups your colleague is in:

  5. How to test if Ansible is installed

    Feb 4, 2026

    You could, of course, just run ansible --version after attempting to install the Ansible Core CLI and its Python dependency onto a Linux box.

  6. Entra has too many OAuth2 Scope Global Consent Grant Options

    Jan 28, 2026

    Last week I wrote about granting OAuth2 authorization within Microsoft Entra ID. I discovered I was half-wrong about scopes.

  7. My Huong Kitchen shoutout

    Jan 26, 2026

    Yes, Tracy and co. from My Huong Kitchen on “Eat Street” in Minneapolis (Nicollet Ave) are actually as thoughtful and friendly as in the videos going around social media.

  8. Tech folks, plan for ICE detainment with your friends

    Jan 19, 2026

    Most of us in tech have probably befriended someone from work who was not born in America, but who is so good at their job that American companies went out of their way to apply for an H1-B work visa, and then perhaps even an employer-sponsored permanent residency (green card), to keep them specifically on the payroll.

  9. Granting OAuth2 AuthZ in Entra

    Jan 15, 2026

    I recently had to troubleshoot an Entra issue that led me down a rabbit-hole crash course in OAuth / Microsoft Entra App Registrations (and their corresponding Entra Service Principals, a.k.a. Entra Enterprise Applications).

  10. Validate networking lines of sight

    Jan 8, 2026

    So, you think set up your firewall correctly? Want to double-check? Below I wrote 2 little PowerShell/Pester scripts to help validate actual lines of sight, once you know what you intended to implement.

  11. Parameterization best practices with Azure Data Factory

    Dec 15, 2025

    If you want to make a “single” Azure Data Factory (“ADF”) git repository that can be seamlessly deployed into both nonproduction and production environments, you’ll have to carefully optimize its parameters and variables, moving hardcoded values as far to the “outside of the onion” as you can.

  12. OIDC issuers: passwordless isn't trustless

    Dec 12, 2025

    Right now, I’m a little stuck deliberating how much I trust the OpenID Connect (“OIDC”) secretless authentication (“authN”) protocol when the OIDC “issuer” isn’t, at the scale of, say, a hyperscaler cloud service provider.

  13. Make automated software test results visible

    Dec 11, 2025

    I’m a big fan of developers proving to QA exactly what happened during automated test execution, by publishing the results into something associated with the Kanban board / work tracking system that the whole team is already using.

  14. Browser-based test automation: collaboration tips

    Dec 11, 2025

    Hot take: developers, not QAs, should implement browser-based end-to-end test automations. Hello Playwright / Cypress / Selenium / Puppeteer / etc. Goodbye BrowserStack Low-Code Automation / etc.

  15. Microsoft-hosted public CI/CD runtimes

    Nov 24, 2025

    I drafted an architectural building block and network diagram to better communicate how publicly-networked Microsoft-hosted CI/CD runtimes work.

  16. Adding Vitest and Playwright tests to Astro

    Nov 22, 2025

    I’ve been kicking out demo codebases faster than I can keep up with blogging them. Here are a few Astro-related codebases to share from my GitHub:

  17. Vendor support shapes how we learn IaC

    Nov 19, 2025

    Hot take / shower thought:  for any given IT resource configurator/administrator, the ease of grasping the point of idempotently declarative approaches to managing the current state of the resource’s configuration is largely dependent upon their good/bad luck with vendor support.  Vendors set the tone for learning journeys.

  18. Licensing E2E Testing Frameworks

    Nov 18, 2025

    If you’re in an enterprise setting, you might need to ask for permission, not forgiveness, when it comes to importing third-party programming language libraries and software development kits (SDKs) into your codebases.

  19. Choosing Terraform vs. Ansible

    Nov 12, 2025

    In my Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool types article, I listed Terraform as a “resource provisioning (day 0)” tool example, and Ansible as a “configuration management (day 1)” tool example.

  20. Azure Blob Storage SAS reasoning via PowerShell Pester

    Nov 12, 2025

    It turns out that once you’ve got PowerShell’s “Pester” module up and running on your computer, you don’t actually need to call Invoke-Pester to run code that includes syntax like Describe and It and | Should -Be. You can just run a normal .ps1 file and those commands simply … work … as if you’d run Invoke-Pester.