Postman has been around for a long time, and is widely used when working with APIs. In addition to documentation, it also has full training courses, including a student expert certification. Here’s a review! Before diving into the course’s content, here’s my completion badge. Good Structured content The course’s content is structured neatly into small, digestible chunks. For example, “Introduction to variables and scripting”, or “Generating code”. There’s a clear top to bottom order to work through, and automatic completion tracking works well. Similarly, each page has subsections to break up ..read more

Did you know Google offers a Cybersecurity Professional Certificate? They do! I recently completed it, and wanted to share the good, the bad, and the confusing parts. Before diving into the review, it’s worth mentioning that the learning platform used for this (Coursera) has a very rewarding referral program, but referral links are NOT used in this article. This way, the review is guaranteed to be impartial. Want to skip alllllll the words and detail? Skip to the conclusion! Overview A few useful links before going into detail: Google’s Cybersecurity Professional Certificate An example of the ..read more

A somewhat hidden feature of GitHub profiles is the special treatment of profile links from 10 social networks. Here’s a full list, how they are detected, and a way to check for yourself! Supported social networks Putting profile links from any of the following websites as a link on GitHub should make the icon appear, and only your username shown. You’ve probably heard of most of them! The supported networks are 8 traditional social networks: Facebook Instagram LinkedIn npm Reddit Twitch X (formerly Twitter) YouTube Plus, 2 decentralised networks: Mastodon Hometown (Mastodon fork) Addition ..read more

When viewing code on GitHub, have you noticed how syntax is almost always highlighted, and repositories have a breakdown of languages used? That’s due to Linguist! Here’s how to add a language. Before we dive into how to add a language, we first need to cover what Linguist is, and what is needed before adding a new language. Throughout this post, I’ll be using the example language of “Lingo”, which I have raised a Linguist PR for. Feel free to refer to that PR if something seems unclear. What is Linguist? Linguist is an open source project run by & used on GitHub itself (a “production depe ..read more

As part of a larger project, I recently extracted all code & assets from a 20+ year old unplayable Adobe Director game: LEGO Junkbot. Here are the files, a discord, and some tips! LEGO Junkbot source code The GitHub repo contains all code, assets, and text files in unmodified format where possible. Adobe Director is pretty painful to use 20 years later, and searching for code and assets within VSCode or similar is much easier! The project’s readme contains plenty more information, but a few highlights are: All game sounds / music: /files/sound/ All level data: /files/levels/ All bricks ..read more

Heard of Adobe Flash? Well, it has an unloved older brother: Adobe Director! I recently needed to access the raw files behind a compiled Director DCR file, here’s how. Since almost everything we’ll be using is deprecated and abandoned, I can’t guarantee the safety of any software mentioned here. I’ve used it all happily, but abandoned software can be a risk. The plan is simple: Install Adobe Director. Decompile our DCR file. Open it up. If you’re interested in doing the same for Flash files (e.g. swf), I’ve previously written a guide! Installing Director Adobe Director reached end of life in ..read more

I recently dived into a world I knew nothing about, not even the language: Modern web development with Next.js. After completing the official tutorials, I was hit with decision paralysis when trying to start an actual project. The solution? Opinionated templates like T3. My decision paralysis So, I wanted to learn Next.js. This required learning the underlying framework (React), a new language (TypeScript), and even an entire ecosystem (npm). I also needed to learn about hosting, databases, APIs, and a million other things I vaguely understood but not enough to actually implement. Sounds easy ..read more

Releasing software can be awkward, especially when working in a complex ecosystem like Gradle for Android. Recently, I at least removed one pain point by autoincrementing version number after a build has been published: here’s how! Overview To autoincrement a version number inside a GitHub Action, we need the ability to do 4 tasks: Automatically make changes to the repo: Using a Personal Access Token. Find the version number, increment it, and commit it: Using gh-action-increment-value. Trigger the workflow on a GitHub release: Using on: release:. Put all the parts together. The ability to d ..read more

Almost exactly a year ago, I migrated from Chrome’s password manager to LastPass. Whilst this was luckily after the breach, the constant “oops, bad news” headlines destroyed my trust in LastPass. My renewal was coming up, but I migrated to 1Password instead: here’s how it went. Why leave LastPass? So yes, I don’t trust LastPass any more. Whilst my vault data wasn’t stolen, given the startling amount of data that was stolen (vaults, notes, website URLs) and how it was taken (keylogging a DevOps engineer via a Plex exploit), it’s pretty scary. Additionally, their communications weren’t good enou ..read more

I recently decided to learn the basics of LaTeX, a way of preparing documents primarily used in STEM academia. I also decided to use VSCode, as I do for almost all other work. This was not as easy as I expected, so here’s a complete beginner’s guide to getting LaTeX working in Visual Studio Code on Windows! Installing LaTeX First up, we need LaTeX support on our system. This is where it instantly can get a little confusing! There are multiple “distributions” of LaTeX (e.g. TeX Live, MiKTeX), which themselves basically package up “TeX”. These distributions have installers, then schemes, package ..read more