Built on Shards of Silicon: Robert Alexander's Tech Blog

In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the official U.S. time reference.

Computer clock synchronization is a complicated process, requiring protocols like NTP and a specialized server to answer requests.

I’ve recently started building a WordPress plugin, which is my first WordPress and PHP-based project.

Many software developers feel we are at a software forge inflection point.

This blog post explores FeedLand.com, an RSS feed reader with unique social elements.

Time is one of those things that is significantly harder to deal with than you’d naively expect.

When social media first entered my life, it came with a promise of connection.

This post is part of a collection on UUIDs.

This post is part of a collection on UUIDs.

I’ve been getting back into blogging and am happy to share that my next group of blog posts will be a collection.

I downloaded the Tranco list of top domain names and ran DNS MX lookups to detect mail servers.

You’ve probably noticed that VSCode is very popular among programmers.

SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) is a mechanism for securing email as it travels between mail servers.

Update: In exciting news, the getlocalcert.net project will continue under new management.

When I’ve talked to developers about the confidentiality of email in transit, between mail servers, I usually hear one of these responses: Everyone knows email isn’t secure While email is vulnerable, hop-to-hop connections between servers are secure enough