Rob Janssen

Are You Flying Blind – How to Regain Control of Production Systems With the Help of Situation Awareness?

A few months of work during a sabbatical yielded a product that nailed a problem in the preventative healthcare space. After a freemium window, the product gained good market traction and you spawn a new company with three coworkers.

How not to check the validity of an email address

Another update, after this post somehow hit #1 on Hacker News and garnered my website more visitors in one hour than it usually gets in a year: I got a lot of feedback on this post. While a lot of it was positive, there was also some valid criticism about the amount of flaming in this post.

My favourite interview question

Some years back, I was interviewed by an interesting start-up in Palo Alto. I was really tempted to take their offer, mostly because:One of the interviewers was an avid Ultimate player; Stanford. In walking distance.

Software Security: Balancing Resources and Risks

Security and software have to go hand in hand, but not all teams are equally equipped. Some organizations retain security experts, some hire consultants, some use multitasking developers. If your company can’t afford a dedicated security expert or team, consider these points.

Plug In an UPS and Get a Program Crash

After publishing the article "Grounded Pointers", a lot of people commented on it. Among other things, they mentioned that various devices are often shipped with extremely poor software. And that gets on nerves quite a bit sometimes. However, I'm not going to grumble about that.

Life of an HTTP Request

When working on web applications we take a lot of supporting technology for granted. We build our code on top of a multi-layered network stack with HTTP as the glue. Each user interaction with our app may cause several HTTP requests that are routed and handled separately, often in parallel.

Introducing the Unit Test Generator for Visual Studio

In this video, Brian Keller interviews Joshua Weber about the new Unit Test Generator which just shipped for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. The Unit Test Generator brings back a scenario which existed in Visual Studio 2010 that allows you to generate unit test stubs from your application code.

Unix Background Queue

For a side-project to be run on a single machine I needed a background queue. I like self-contained software like sqlite, but I didn’t know of any self-contained background queue. They usually rely on some kind of broker, whether that is Redis or a database.

No Code is Good Code

You’ve probably read The Daily WTF. There are some real atrocious samples of code on that site.

Addresses and Nodes: Two Ways To Get Around

Last week, I noted that programs that avoid address arithmetic can also avoid moving data. The reason is that it is only arithmetic that really cares about where in memory an object is; in other circumstances, having a pointer to that memory is enough.

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.