Posts

Automate a way to turn off Bluetooth on logout and turn back on for login.

Download a script, check its SHA-256, and only then run it, using tools you already have.

I publish my Keep Sorted extension to both the Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX. I wanted releases to come straight out of GitHub Actions instead of my machine. Getting there took more trial and error than I expected, so here is the setup in a form you can copy into your own extension.

I created a VSCode extension recently (awalsh128/vscode-keep-sorted) and learned a lot of lessons trying to set up the test environment. What I wanted was: Tests that run against a real VSCode instance, not mocks. An immutable test workspace, so every test starts from the same files. A log file per test, so I can see what the extension did when a test fails. Principles # Some things I learned the hard way about testing extensions.

SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, and how to use them for monitoring, on-call, and incident response.

VSCode Keep Sorted Extension Note Updated October 2026 for version 1.0.3. This post originally announced the 0.0.1 release in December 2025. Commands, settings, and features below reflect the latest version.

If you have experience in the software engineering field, an interview process can test the experience you have; projects, production scenarios, designs. Unfortunately, for junior positions and those out of college, there isn’t much to test for. Since most are computer scientists, you could test knowledge of algorithms and data structures but does that really prove the ability of a candidate? Knowing the upper bound complexity of an algorithm’s runtime is important but what about when a constant multiplying factor means the difference between production being up and down. We don’t have a solution for the Traveling Salesman Problem but we have very good and practical approximations (e.g. flight scheduling).

Customizable and modernized Doxygen themes.

Introduction of compiler basics using a toy example.

Create a testing harness for your created GitHub Actions.

Integrate your GitHub projects with a code analysis tool.

Fluent style querying for C++.

An example of a simple library using CMake.

A GitHub action to cache APT packages for future workflow runs..

Assert a condition and throw with a dynamic message in a single line in C++.

Understanding how memory semantics works in C++ from the perspective of a C# or Java dev.

Flashback # The last time I used Unix-to-Unix format (AKA UUEncoding) was when USENET was still the big thing and Mosaic web browser was just coming out. That was until recently, when I had a requirement to encode and decode this file type.

I was recently putting some PowerShell scripts together for deployment and maintenance of software to our machine instances. One of the requirements was to be able to discover the service name from a Windows Service executable that uses ServiceInstaller. I needed to be able to extract this value in a generic way in order to query the service and stop it if running. Here is what I was able to put together.

Rookie Moves # Awhile ago, I had originally created a single logger for each service and shared it statically across the application.

Motivation # I had these flyweights that added a lot of overhead to the serialization process. They weren't really needed in the serialized payload either. In fact, I could recreate the flyweight in memory from just a single property on the object.