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2-Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) are ways of securing accounts above and beyond normal password protection. Typically, we think of 2FA as something you know (your password) and something you have (a device). The idea is that if you compromise one, you still can’t get access to the protected resource. A room protected by a keypad and ID card reader is a great example of 2FA. You might be able to guess the code, but you’d also need a valid ID card to get access to the locked room....

I’ve been working on a library that includes some vector manipulations in Go, trying to follow good development practices and starting with writing my tests first. But early on, I ran into a bit of a problem: floating points. The problem Now, we know that floating points are an issue in programming, by the very nature of how they’re represented in memory. I loved Julia Evans’s brief explanation of how floats work in her Linux Comics Zine (scroll down to the sixth panel), and for a more in-depth explanation, see this piece by Carl Burch....

I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. I’ll break it down into three posts: Pre-work Writing Presenting (this one) Presenting This is the fun part!...

I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. I’ll break it down into three posts: Pre-work Writing (this one) Presenting Writing Everyone’s process differs for how they craft a talk....

I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. Empty Auditorium, Flickr image CC-BY-2.0 I’ll break it down into three posts:...

A couple of weeks ago, Jessica Rose posed this question to the tech crowd: What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you entered the industry? — Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) August 7, 2017 It’s a great question. Previously, I had different answers depending what age range I was addressing – one for middle school students, and another one entirely for college students. While the answers I’ve given have changed throughout my career, I think I can consolidate all the different versions into this one:...

Getting a computer to see and understand stuff is hard. Way hard. Like, hard for a long time. For a bit of context, slide 15 seems to be the definitive abbreviated history, dating all the way back to 1966. If you want to dig into the details, there’s a free Udacity course on computer vision offered by Georgia Tech. However, you can add computer vision and intelligence capabilities to your applications without the deep understanding of machine learning by using Google Cloud Vision....

In the last few entries on creating a containerized Minecraft server, we created the container, launched the server, moved data to a volume, created regular backups of our world, took a look at customizing the server’s properties, and updated changes to the container. Right now, our setup is pretty solid! So, let’s get to that fun and impractical thing I mentioned that we’d be doing with Kubernetes. Lego® representation of a Minecraft mooshroom in a mushroom biome...

Last time, I said that in the next entry in this series I would do something fun (and likely impractical) with kubernetes. I lied; sorry. Since then, I received several great questions that I didn’t manage to cover, so I thought that I’d address a couple of them now. This entry will be rather piecemeal, but hopefully much shorter than the prior ones! Customizing the server.properties file The start of accidental PVP harm...

This is Part II in a series on running a Minecraft server in a container on Google Cloud Platform. If you missed Part I, make sure to glance over it for context. Last time Last time, you took an existing application (a modded Minecraft server) and containerized it, using the Debian base image. You used a Google Cloud Platform container-optimized image to build our image and run the resulting container on Google Compute Engine (GCE)....