Living Life on the Outside

It's me, Lucian Buzzo, and this is my personal blog, where I write about things that interest me.
You can check out my GitHub profile here and my Twitter profile here.

Tag33: An ID System for Humans

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how clunky most identification systems are, especially when it comes to human readability and…

You need to stop Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting

In 2006, Jeff Bezos gave a keynote speech at MIT, where he introduced the concept of “Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting.” In this address…

Being Noble

A noble endeavor brings to mind thoughts of chivalry, justice and high-minded ideals. To be noble is intrinsically linked to the…

Solving Water Sort

There is a puzzle game that I enjoy playing called “water sort”, and it involves sorting colored liquids into containers. There are a lot of…

How to Start Coding: A Practical Guide

As someone who’s often asked how to get into software development and learn to code, I thought it would be helpful to share some advice…

Are Good Engineers Lazy?

I often hear people talk about how good engineers are “lazy.” This always puzzles me, as it doesn’t quite seem to fit what I understand…

Exploring Cryptography - Frequency Analysis pt.3

In part 2 I showed how you could crack a Caesar Cipher using frequency analysis alone. In this post I’m going to look at applying a similar…

Exploring Cryptography - Frequency Analysis pt.2

In my previous post, I explored frequency analysis and how it can be used to break simple substitution ciphers, specifically the Caesar…

Exploring Cryptography - Frequency Analysis

In this article we will be looking at a simple technique for breaking a simple substitution cipher. This technique is called frequency…

Definitions for filtering properties in JSON schema

Using to remove undefined fields from an object, is a feature that crops up regularly in JSON schema libraries, but tends to have some…

Writing bad Javascript micro libraries

Like many developers, I have a few Javascript libraries that turn to again and again. I often find myself loading the full jQuery and lodash…

How to painlessly deploy Drupal fields

In Drupal 7, deploying new fields from a development environment onto a production server can be a tricky and time consuming business…

How to improve your Mac’s terminal part 3 - changing prompt in an SSH session

After improving the prompt in my terminal I was pretty happy with it (see [part 2 of this series][./terminal-improvement-2]), unfortunately…

How to improve your Mac’s terminal part 2 - the prompt

My prompt remained largely unchanged for a long time until I came across this article written by the excellent Mark Otto (of Twitter…

How to improve your Mac’s terminal part 1

I spend a lot of my time at work using Terminal. Connecting to servers, managing version control and editing files (I’m a Vim user…