Today, at work (Dev Forum), I gave a talk about functional programming and some of the cool takeaways that I found interesting (focusing on Haskell). This post won’t be long as I am presently quite busy, but I just wanted to throw this up there today, rather than tomorrow.

You can find the presentation here, along with presenter notes. It’s in Keynote format, and the presenter notes are sort of rough and intended for the presenter (obviously), but I hope they can be useful.

As a software developer, I’ve never really considered “software engineering” a ‘valid’ engineering discipline. This thread on Reddit has changed my mind about that. Software can be engineered.

The Let’s Encrypt initiative is a fantastic program that is going to offer free https certificates! However, the one catch is that you need to use their command program to get a free certificate. You have to run it on your your server as root, and it tries to edit your apache/nginx config files.

I love the Let’s Encrypt devs dearly, but there’s no way I’m going to trust their script to run on my server as root, be able to edit my server configs, and have access to my private keys. I’d just like the free ssl certificate, please.

So I made a script that does that.

This video is a must watch for any software developer who cares about their craft. Old, but timeless.

It’s been almost a year since I posted on this blog, but here we are again.

Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority in private beta that provides free certificates (automated generation, renewal, and with Apache, setup (nginx coming soon)). They are a public service.

They are now trusted by all major browsers, as they have received a cross-signature from IdenTrust.

I’m looking forward to the day that encrypted data doesn’t stand out, because it’s the norm. I’m really excited with, and grateful for, what the team at Let’s Encrypt are doing.

For those concerned about issuing certificates to phishing and malware sites, read this article by them.