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.

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…