Review - Elevation of Privilege

Review - The Social Engineering Game

Review - The Agile App Security Game

Central Coast Coders Talk – March 10, 2021

This Wednesday was the first Meetup for Central Coast Coders, and I did a talk sharing some of the games we’ve used to train our team in application security. I’ll be putting up some blog posts over the next few weeks based on the talk, but in the meantime you can download my slides here.

How Time Tracking Makes Our Software Team Better

At Blueshift, every member of our team tracks 100% of their work time, from the most junior engineer to our CEO. That means from the minute we start work in the morning to the minute we leave, we record exactly what we’ve been doing, every minute of the day...

Leveling Up Your Career

There are times in your life and career when you know you’ve reached a new high, like when you were a kid and you finally got to that next level in Mario. One such high was a few months after I started my blog when I got my first LinkedIn message from a Google recruiter...

A Case Study in SQL Performance Troubleshooting

A few months ago, we started to get reports of performance issues from one of our clients. The reports were pretty light on detail, but the gist was that SSAS cube reports built in excel were running slower than usual and sometimes failing to refresh...

Why

I like things to be efficient. While writing this I looked up synonyms of “efficient”, and all the words just filled me with joy. “well organized”, “methodical”, “structured”, “logical”, it’s like someone just wrapped up all my favourite things into one word...

SQL Server String Concatenation and Truncation

We use a lot of dynamic SQL in the SQL Server database for our application (it seemed like a good idea at the time), and for some time we’ve noticed some strange issues with strings getting truncated when concatenating large dynamic queries...

When the Numbers are all Wrong

The phone rings, and with the usual reluctance of a software engineer on technical support, you answer “Hello, you’ve reached Blueshift, what can I do for you?”...

How To Do Support And Love It

Software engineers hate doing technical support, and they can’t talk to clients. These are often considered to be basic truths of the software industry, but are these real limitations? (Spoiler alert: I think no). Our company Blueshift recently restructured and merged our development and support teams..