Advent of Code Day 7

Advent of Code 2020 Map

As the holidays come to an end, I have completed (well not finished, but been working on while I had free time) Advent of Code. I’ve talked about this in years past, but the short of it is 25 days of coding problems. Day 7 has to do with playing a game of Camel Cards.

2024 Retirement Calculator

Rifle Military Biathalon U.S. Army

Now that Congress has finally passed this year’s NDAA, we know what the final pay tables for 2024 will look like. This updated calculator also includes updates to the IRS tax brackets for 2023 and the new VA disability rates that went into effect Dec 2023. Again, if you see any mistakes, please let me »

Building a (Cheap) Minecraft Server on AWS

Box Headed Minecraft Men

My oldest kid wanted a Minecraft server for them and their friends, but I didn’t want to pay to run one 24/7. What should have been an easy project turned into a lot of discovery learning. Save yourself sometime and read this.

Requirements

Requirements road sign

I’ve been an engineer for a long time. In order to solve problems, my customer gives me requirements so that I can provide solutions. But the process breaks when the customer shortcuts the requirements process.

One More Time About Time

Time Zones

I’ve written about the importance of having accurate time before, and have always said that it can be difficult to keep a proper clock. I’ve always looked at it from a technical standpoint but a couple of days ago, one of my students sent me a video
and it caused me to look at the topic of time from a completely different perspective.

New Adventures

Today I am excited to announce that I have a new job! After spending the last year and a half or so at SEE, I’ve decided to make the move to SealingTech. While I love the team at SEE, SealingTech offered me a new adventure.

Workstation Setup

Dev Ops

I’ve been doing dev work for years but have never taken the time to document how I like my setup which means every time I do it again, I have to figure it all out again.

Implementing SSLSplit

A couple of weeks ago I talked about using SSLSplit to at as a proxy so that I could examine the mechanics of a Docker pull. I decided to go ahead a set up a purpose-built VM just for this so I could easily do this again in the future. I wanted to go ahead and document (and share) the steps that I went through for this.