Quinn's Blog

How did we end up here I’ve decided to add Unity to my long list of unfinished “learn a new thing” projects. This decision was inspired by a…

I’ve worked a bit more on the compiler, implementing the parsing and code generation steps. So, the program to compile is as follows…

As a programmer I enjoy building things. I also like knowing how things work, I figure the two are related. There are a few things that I…

All I wanted to do was redirect quinnshanahan.com to quinn.io. Simple, right? Simple enough to not require a server, right? As simple as…

Setup a blog using Gatsby.js that publishes on push using github actions to github pages

Functional demo can be found here: GitHub — quinn/lambda-nodejs-example Here’s a process for creating simple backends for a web client app…

General project structure:

Just a quick tip to save you from writing "-p 1234" on the command line.

Here are a few little things I use on a daily basis while working with docker.

Even if you use a non-standard username and strong password it can still be a burden on your server getting hit with the occasional brute-force attack to Wordpress's login page. Here you can use ModSecurity to limit the number requests and save resources.

Sometimes tools like google analytics don't provide the insight you need and it can be helpful to go directly to the source: the log files.

Setting up metasploit from scratch can be a bit convoluted, here are steps I took to get it set up on OS X.

Using iframes in your app can be excruciating, especially when the iframe and the parent window are on two different domains. I'm going to go over the process of facilitating bi-directional communication between the iframe and it's parent window.

I'm wrapping NGINX in a small go script to capture the output of the log files and pass them to STDOUT and STDERR. This is somewhat of a follow-up on my original post about running NGINX in the foreground.

I've had trouble finding a good reference for hstore and arrays in postgres that includes examples and use-cases so I decided to put together my own here. Hopefully others can get some use out of it. I've also included some examples of how to use with ActiveRecord.

There are plenty of tools that provide easy ways to do controller testing in rails, but sometimes in can be nice to test against a specifically built rack env when testing a controller or middleware. Here I dig through some Rails internals to figure out some different ways of doing this.

Docker is a wonderfully fun tool that makes building things like a PaaS almost trivial. I've documented a brief intro to some of Docker's common cli functions

I know this has been documented many times, but I felt this was necessary because I am still seeing many more descriptions of the "wrong" way to do this rather than the right way. Hopefully I can help tip the scales a bit on the subject.

If you're planning on using nginx as a frontend to one or more app processes, it can be helpful to setup and test things locally. An easy way to do this is to run nginx in the foreground so you can quickly iterate your config options to see what works.

Sometimes it can be nice to develop against a local gem without modifying your Gemfile. Bundler provides a convenient mechanism for this, but it is limited in the scenarios that it will work under. Here I describe a simple approach to get a similar effect.

I'm going to document here some basics about git. I think a lot of very skilled developers who use git everyday haven't yet "grocked" the fundamentals of how it works.

I just coded up a simple plugin to enable placeholder text for inputs in browsers that don’t support it yet. This isn’t tested thoroughly…

Exciting news, my friend Kevin (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kevin-incorvia/20/339/508/) just launched an alpha of his new site: http…

Is everyone up on ctrl+R in bash? It lets you do a reverse filter search through your bash history (kind of like history piped to grep but…

I know Datamapper is probably considered “old news” at this point, which is something I think unfortunate considering its low adoption rate…

I just updated my server to use nginx from apache/mod_php because loading wordpress on my tiny slicehost slice was tanking the poor thing…