Manage Passwords With GPG, The Command Line, And Pass

There are a lot of password managers on the market, some in the cloud, some local, all with features that may or may not be useful in all circumstances. I’m personally an advocate of being in control of your secure information and shedding reliance on closed source or cloud alternatives. This is why I use pass, the standard unix password manager.

The pass application is Mac and Linux compatible, but Windows support probably isn’t impossible. The application works by maintaining a list of password files that have been encrypted using GPG, a widely used cryptography software. Decrypting the files will result in access to your password information.

We’re going to take a look at using pass and see why it is a convenient option for password management.

Moving From Couchbase To HERE, The Adventure Continues

Back in 2015, I shared my story about becoming a Developer Advocate at Couchbase in an article titled, Ending My Adventure at UC Merced and Starting Fresh.

In the three years that I’ve been at Couchbase, I’ve had a positive impact towards spreading awareness, getting product adoption, and making developers successful. I’ve also grown as a developer as well as an evangelist in the process.

This is where my story at Couchbase ends and my new adventure with HERE begins!

Resolve Google AdSense Publisher Violations For Valuable Inventory Problems

I don’t typically write about these topics since they aren’t on the subject of development and operations, but this week Google AdSense put my account on restricted probation for violating its policies, something I hadn’t intentionally planned on doing.

After receiving an email from Google and visiting the policy area of the Google AdSense dashboard, I learned that I had a Valuable Inventory: No Content violation for a domain that wasn’t mine and I hadn’t even heard of.

So what do you do when you’re in violation for something you do and don’t have control over?

We’re going to see some of the things that you can do to keep your account in good standing, beyond the obvious things such as being annoying.

Use Sendy To Build And Maintain An Email List For Cheap

When you’re building a business, the experts all say that you should make your list building strategy a priority. Using social networks like Twitter and Facebook for your marketing is great, but those might not be around forever. Email has been around for a long time and it will likely exist a long time into the future as well.

I’ve briefly mentioned this before, but I’m currently using Sendy to manage my email subscribers and send out my monthly newsletter. However, I wasn’t always using Sendy to accomplish this task. For around a year, I was using Mailchimp, a similar product.

We’re going to see what Sendy is, how to use it, and why I’m using it over the various alternatives that exist.

Tracy Developer Meetup in California

After having thought about it for quite some time, I’ve finally decided to start a developer user group in my home town of Tracy, California. This group titled, The Tracy Developer Meetup, was started to give developers living outside of the Bay Area, a chance to collaborate with other developers in the same position.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tracy, it is a town about 1.5 hours from San Francisco and Mountain View, but significantly more affordable and home to many engineers that commute to the Bay Area for work.

Write Blog Articles In Markdown On The Polyglot Developer

As you may or may not know, The Polyglot Developer is happy to accept guest contributions from the developer community. To find out more, check out the article titled, Write Guest Articles on The Polyglot Developer Blog. With that said, I’ve been receiving a lot of questions regarding Markdown, the format in which these blog articles are crafted.

The Polyglot Developer uses Hugo which is similar to Jekyll in the sense that articles are written in Markdown and then built into HTML. Don’t worry, Markdown is not bad and you’ll see how much more convenient it is than writing in other formats.

We’re going to get a quick look at producing content in Markdown so it can be published on the web.

My Activity Report For 2017

This marks the third year that I’ve been producing content for The Polyglot Developer and all of its channels. It’s been a long year and I’ve accomplished a lot, some of which was different than previous years.

Below you’ll find my statistics that may help you if you’re planning on creating a blog or developing a course. It will give you an idea of costs and what to expect.