Bennett Notes

My mother called me today and inquired about my week. As usual, I try to steer the conversation toward more exciting topics and away from my occupation. I start out with a, “Yeah mom, I’m preparing for this fight in my Muay Thai class tonight.” Or something like, “Guess what Mom? I found ultra cheap tickets to London.” Without fail though, she always comes back to the dreaded, “That’s nice dear, so how’s working going?

The team and I were searching for solutions that enabled us to secure the communication between the microservices that we have running in our Rancher cluster. Our first application consisted of a set of services that essentially performed CRUD operations using the typical RESTful architecture (GET, POST, PUT, etc). We decided to use Istio because it offered a compelling solution that incorporated the use of mTLS (mutual TLS authentication). For us, this meant that we didn’t need to manage certificates ourselves our worry about the individual TLS implementation of each service in its respective language.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but all business ideas seem to originate from a finite group of categories; each having an unique trajectory to fruition. I would arbitrarily describe these categories as A, B, C and D. Category A - Solve a known problem A client comes to you with a problem, and you solve it in exchange for compensation. There is little to no guesswork as to whether there are paying customers or anyone who actually wants what you’re building.

Listening to the Jordan Harbinger podcast, I learned a tip about making effective small talk; the F.E.W. approach. Facts, Emotions and Why. Facts: Start with asking a fact. “Where do you work?” Emotion: Follow up with an emotion. “How do you like working there?” Why: Dig a little deeper “What made you choose the career path?” It’s important to mix this up with statements of your own in-between the questions so you don’t sound like a robot.

Everyone tells me, “Dave, you shouldn’t be living just for the weekend!” But I wonder, how do people who work in a typical 9-5 corporate environment avoid lusting over the liberty and excitement that the weekend brings. Two whole days to do what you want to do; spending time with family or friends, traveling, working on side projects, gaming, etc. For me, it means two whole days where I don’t have to be in a windowless room coding in front of a computer screen for eight hours.

Have you ever needed to cast music from your PC to your Android device? Let’s walk though a quick tutorial that will show you have to use your Android as a bluetooth speaker. Download Android Wireless Speaker App Begin by downloading the app wireless speaker for android. All you need to do is download it, and launch it. No further configuration is needed. Take note of that IP address that is listed for your phone in the app.

If you are developing a Chrome extension with message passing, then you might have received the following error: Unchecked runtime.lastError: Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist.. There was some type of behavior change that happened post Chrome 72 that affected the way channels are opened. Essentially, if you try to call runetime.connect() before you have a a channel open, then you will get this error (Stackoverflow).

Let’s take a look at how you can run android apps in Chrome browser. Keep in mind, this is more of a proof of concept than something you should heavily rely on. While simple apps and games will work, you will most likely run into issues when trying android apps with advanced graphics. To run android apps in Chrome browser we are going to use a modified version of the android-chrome runtime found inside of chrome.

Last Saturday, I spent several hours working on my website’s code. I added some new meta tags to lazy load images, tried to remove JQuery dependencies from my scripts, added enhancements for accessibility and structured data, and even created a pull request for the theme that I am using (Beautiful Hugo). Basically, five hours of my day were eaten up by completing those tasks. Although this was another example of getting too absorbed in your side projects, I was actually proud of myself.

When I was a kid, it was easy to merrily invest myself in any activity that I found interesting. Building robots, learning to play guitar, and making short films were things that I would work on after school everyday. I did all those things simply because I enjoyed doing them. Now, as a young adult, I feel like I completely lost that spontaneity and simple mindset. Every project which I take up has become an attempt to make money.