When using my work laptop, I like to keep a copy of my dotfiles so that my tools at work are in sync with my tools at home. They live in a Gitlab repository under my personal account, and I use plain old git to sync changes. In order to push and pull changes from Gitlab, I use an SSH key rather than a password. It's easy enough to generate one of course but I also have one for the internal repository at my work.

Sometimes I'll want to email someone but I don't know if their email address is valid. Likewise, they might have verbally told it to you, but you can't remember if it has a dot or a dash! Luckily, there's a handy way to find out using a mix of nslookup and telnet. I'll take you through a recent example where I wanted to email Ian Small, the CEO of Evernote, to thank him and the Evernote team for their wonderful Behind the Scenes videos.

It's 6:30pm on my 25th birthday and I've been reflecting a bit on what I've managed to accomplish so far. While this isn't a post about that, there's no better time to assess the state of my personal site and where I'd like to go forward. The current state At present, my blog isn't really best effort. I'd like to write more things but I never really make it an actual goal.

Have you ever stored a password in Jenkins, only to forget later on what the value is? You might try logging it from inside an existing job, but you'll find that Jenkins goes out of its way to mask that value from you (and any potential attackers!) There's a sneaky way to get those credentials out of a Jenkins agent that requires only a little bit of wrangling. It may be possible to lock this down, I haven't looked, so it's good to be aware of it, in order to consider the security implications too.

I recently started running the Windows Insider builds on my desktop so that I could play around with the new Windows Subsystem for Linux but I ran into some trouble. Before I get into the fix, here's a little bit of history The history For the unfamiliar, it's a way to run Linux applications inside of a Windows environment using a lightweight VM. For the familiar, you may have heard of WSL 1, which essentially translated Linux system calls into their appropriate NT kernel counterparts.