Coding JamesLatest posts
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Hackfest 2019 - Upside Down Edition
Yet another month of November draws to a close, meaning that another edition of Hackfest, an awesome infosec conference held in Quebec City, just happened. Here is the summary of my 5th presence at the event, which pretty much makes it a tradition by now. -
Recycling a MacBook Pro top lid into a glowing frame
This winter, I managed to complete a project I wanted to do for a pretty long time. In 2017, I had a car accident and my MacBook Pro was heavily damaged. I could not resolve myself to just put it in the trash, so I had the idea to frame the top lid and put a small LED behind the logo to make it glow when I wanted. It was a great way for me to learn more about electronics and Arduino. -
Hackfest 2018 - Decade Edition
Early this month, I attended the 10th edition of Hackfest. It was my 4th presence at the event and I absolutely had a blast! Here are some thoughts on the event. -
My thoughts after reading Slipstream Time Hacking, by Benjamin Hardy
I discovered Benjamin’s content through his writings on Medium and I really liked his perspective on life and work. He wrote many books, but this one particularly intrigued me. Here is what I thought after reading Slipstream Time Hacking, by Benjamin Hardy. -
Becoming a bug bounty hunter: Learning resources
When I started studying computer science, I was particularly interested in 2 fields: mobile app development and information security. Fast-forward 5 years, as of today I’m a software developer doing web and mobile apps, but I still got a strong interest toward security, especially application security. For the last few years, I tried to get into infosec more seriously, at least to make the apps I work on more secure. I began going to Hackfest, an awesome infosec conference in Quebec(Canada), and participating to the CTFs. I am definitely not at a level to compete against the other participants, but I have fun and I learn a lot. Every talk, I noted down book suggestions, twitter handles and blogs in the hope to consume the content and become as good as I could. Lately, I decided to get into bug bounty hunting and needed to sort out all the resources I gathered to focus on the most interesting ones. Here is what I came up with(I also intend to keep this post up-to-date when I find other nice content). -
Making 360° panoramas to embed in a web page
I recently needed to prepare a virtual tour at my workplace. I started looking for a simple and affordable solution. I wanted to capture the office’s 360° panoramas then, embed it in an HTML document. I was very pleased to find out that this can be done quite easily using free tools and the result looks pretty good! -
Documentary 'App: The Human Story' presents what it means to be an indie app developer
As a developer, I have independent software business ambitions. But I understand it’s definitely not an easy path, and even less a guaranteed success. The documentary App: The Human Story shows the ups and downs of independent iOS app development, bringing to light the challenges of running such businesses, beyond the technical struggle. -
My summary of Laracon Online 2018
Laracon Online is a distributed online conference where the talks are streamed live. Video recordings are also available shortly afterwards. This has proven very useful for me this year, because I could not watch the entire live broadcast. Since I finally managed to catch up on the talks I missed, here is what I got out of this 2nd edition of Laracon Online! -
How to use free tools to record microphone and computer output simultaneously on macOS
macOS eases the multimedia content creation process due to its great features and accessible tools such as iMovie, GarageBand and QuickTime Player. Contrary to what one would think, QuickTime Player is more than a simple media player. It has basic editing capabilities like trimming clips and reordering/adding sequences on a single timeline. Even more interesting, it includes a sweet recording functionality. This allows to record audio, video from a webcam and, last but not least, a screen’s video feed from your computer(or even a plugged in iOS device)! One challenge that arises when recording your computer’s screen is to capture the audio from your microphone AND the sound output at the same time through QuickTime Player. Here is how to solve this using Soundflower and macOS’s built-in tools. -
Hackfest 2017 - Nine Lives Edition Summary
For a third year in a row, I had the opportunity to go to Hackfest. Once again, the conferences were awesome, the venue well organized and the CTFs packed with fun and challenge. Here is a summary of some of the talks I attended. -
Exploring static site generators: Jekyll vs. Jigsaw
When I first heard about Jekyll, I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about this tool. That’s when I discovered that it was part of a full-fledged tool category: static site generators. Here is what I learned when rewriting this blog and my personal website using 2 different static generators. -
How to test Twitter cards from localhost
When redesigning my personal website and this blog, I wanted to implement Twitter Cards attributes to provide a rich experience when sharing links on the platform. Twitter offers a Card validator, but since I was running a development server on my machine, the online validator could not reach it. Here is the nice tool that helped me solve this issue. -
Let's build pi-hub, Part 1
I have been wanting to play with a Raspberry Pi for quite some time and I finally found a project I wanted to do. In this Let’s build article series, I will document what I learn while building a home dashboard(weather, upcoming calendar events, pictures carousel) with a Raspberry Pi. In this first part, I will share some tips to configure the Pi to get started. -
Migrating my personal website to Jigsaw
I recently redesigned and migrated my personal website to Jigsaw, a static site generator built using the same technologies as Laravel. Here is what I learned along the way. -
Migrating my blog to Jekyll
I have been trying to blog for about a year. I initiallly used a self-hosted Wordpress blog, but I recently decided to try something else. I have been looking at Jekyll for some time and finally took the leap to migrate my existing content. Here is how it went and what I think about it so far. -
My notes from Laracon Online 2017
On March 8th 2017, I attended the very first Laracon Online event. This official Laravel conference was entirely streamed live, the speakers were doing their talk from their home/office. The atmosphere was pretty different compared to a traditional conference, but the formula worked very well for a single-day event. Luckily for me, the schedule was based on the same time zone as mine, so I could enjoy the presentations live, without sacrificing sleep. However, for those in different parts of the world, recordings were available the very next day. The conference was packed full of great content, even for someone slowly learning Laravel on the side. Here is a write-up of my notes and what I learned, from the standpoint of someone learning the framework. -
My thoughts after reading The software developer’s life manual, by John Sonmez
Each and every day, I work hard to become a better developer as well as a better human-being. This means that I’m constantly on a quest for new knowledge. The Internet has brought new ways to consume content, but, sometimes, a well-detailed and logically-organized book about a subject is easier to read than 100s of blog posts. After following John Sonmez’s Entreprogrammer podcast and reading his blog, I decided to read the book he has written. Here is what I think after reading Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual and how it influenced my life ever since. -
My experience migrating an app to Swift 3
I recently have been working on migrating an app written in Swift 2 to Swift 3. The process of updating a medium-sized app(10 screens, about 12k lines of code, over 100 files) took 3 days. Here is how it went and what I learned along the way. -
Hackfest 2016 - Infinity Edition Summary
On the first weekend of November, I had the chance to attend Hackfest in Quebec City, the largest hacking and InfoSec event in Canada! Here is a summary of the 2 awesome days, and nights, I had there. -
Superhuman Social Skills, by Tynan - Book summary
Here is what I learned from the last book I read: Superhuman Social Skills: A Guide to Being Likeable, Winning Friends, and Building Your Social Circle, by Tynan. As stated in the title, this book is about improving your social skills to make sure others enjoy being around you, thus(hopefully) bringing you more interesting social interactions. -
My summary and thoughts on Apple's September 2016 event
Today I’ll make a summary(and share my thoughts along the way) of Apple’s September 2016 event where the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2 were announced. -
Why did I start this blog?
In this article, I will try to articulate the reasons that drove me to start a blog. -
It’s a beginning! But first, let me introduce myself :)
As stated in the blog title, my name is James and I must say that I very much like to write code!
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