Blogs on Alex Gaynor

An alternate title for this post would be “Why GPG isn’t ok in 2017”.

Say you’ve got a website, and because you care about protecting the privacy of your visitors and the integrity of the content you serve to them, your website is served over HTTPS.

For a year or so I’ve been running a Chrome extension I wrote, which tracks which origins my Chrome makes the most http:// requests to, in an effort to make my https:// advocacy more data driven.

In Richard Feynman’s appendix to the Roger’s Commission report on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of the issues he describes is a lack of understanding of the term “safety factor” by NASA managers: This is a strange use of the engineer’s term,…

For the past 2 years I’ve been working for the US Government at the United States Digital Service.

In case you haven’t heard, this week Google announced a project called OSS-Fuzz.

What is threat modeling?

Before I describe the vulnerability, I want to give huge thanks to Ben Bangert and Alessandro Molina for quickly responding to my report, and to Paul Kehrer for reviewing and confirming my findings.

If you haven’t heard, Let’s Encrypt is a brand new certificate authority offering free, automated, and trusted HTTPS certificates.

Almost every good idea this blog post comes from [David Reid], the bad ones are mine.

It's an unfortunate reality, but one of the few things we know about software quality is that lines of code is positive correlated with bugs, or as Notorious B.I.G. would say, "Mo Code Mo Problems".

Information security is hard.

What’s the biggest difference between offering some functionality as an open source library, and in offering it as an HTTP API?

I’ve been following along with Rust for quite a while.

Security is hard.

This blog post is a short list of things you can do, on basically any web project, to improve performance, scalability, and cost.

Fuzzing is a technique in computer testing and security where you generate a bunch of random inputs, and see how some program handles it.

Red Hat has a pretty interesting business model, which is offering support for software that is a decade old, and which its maintainers want nothing to do with.

If I put 10 people in a room and asked them what “DevOps” was all about, I think I’d get 17 different answers.

22 days ago I became a founding member of the new Digital Service team at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

About six weeks ago I blogged about the state of the news and TLS.

Two commissioners resign from the Federal Elections Committee.

I’ve previously written about the importance of TLS.

About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter.

Here’s what a day looks like in my ultimate development environment: Get into the office on Monday morning at 9; I’m a big fan of working from an office on a “normal” schedule (it’s not important to me that everyone else do this though).

After three months, Robert Mendoza is confirmed by the Senate as Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court.

Our episode begins with the First Lady and a 14-year old boy appearing on television to talk about the exploitation of child labor around the world.

The President is taking a trip to Los Angeles!

Today’s episode contains more behind-the-scenes than usual.

The President is flying back from Stockholm on a Friday evening when the Supreme Court reject a request for a stay of execution for Simon Cruz, a man convicted of multiple murders.

This episode covers “take out the trash day”, a Friday where the White House releases all the news stories that they don’t want to get too much attention (the idea being each of the stories will compete with the others, ensuring none get too much attentio…

It’s January, and the State of the Union is just a few days.

There’s a trend I’ve seen recently where folks will make ridiculous or offensive arguments, and then say “I’m just playing devil’s advocate” as if that means something.

As a result of Congressman Lillienfield’s claim that one in three White House staffers used drugs, Josh Lyman performed an internal investigation.

A gay high school senior is killed in an extremely gruesome hate crime in Minnesota.

Justice Joseph Crouch of the Supreme Court announces that he’s retiring.

This episode is all about a major banking reform bill in the house.

The White House is holding a state dinner for the President of Indonesia and his wife.

Welcome back to “The West Wing Revisited”, where I try to track down what the plots of The West Wing would look like to the general public.

This episode covers “Big Block of Cheese Day”, where individuals who normally couldn’t get the time of the day from the White House get to meet with senior staffers to pitch their pet issue.

Returning visitors: notice anything different?

Last year I wrote about how it was possible to do code review without being a jerk, but I didn’t show you how.

This episode follows the White House’s attempt to get a gun control bill through congress.

The last episode ended with the Syrian Army downing a US military air craft carrying more than 50 people.

Welcome to the second edition of “The West Wing Revisited”.

Last year I wrote about why I think it's important to support diversity within our communities, and about some of the work the Ada Initiative does to support this.

(This post contains spoilers) Regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big Aaron Sorkin fan (If you’re not a regular reader, now would be a good time to get started, there’ll be a quiz at the end).

When I was in the third grade my friend Alexander and I invented a math game (whereby invented I mean, “I’m unable to precisely track down the origins of this game, so I’m assuming we created it entirely on our own”).

This year has been marked, for me, by many many discussions of Python versions.

I’ve spent just about every single day for the last 6 months doing something with Python 3.