17 December 2025
I asked people to vent about the worst tools or processes they ever had to use for work. The responses surprised me a bit.
30 November 2025
We need to stop doing big tech "modernization" projects as a concept. Puppies as a proxy for code.
19 August 2025
You can heavily customize your IPython shell experience when using it inside Docker or in a Docker Compose project. Without your personal preferences annoying your teammates!
29 June 2025
Frank's current favorite CLI tools, configurations, workflows, and tips for developers and ops folks.
08 June 2025
5 minutes and $0.22 later Claude built me a custom color palette to make it easy to visualize, copy, and use my custom Tailwind colors into this React app.
07 June 2025
Being lazy is often the most productive thing you will do all day.
26 April 2025
just is a better way of documenting project specific commands than using a Makefile or a folder full of scripts. It is easy to get started with, powerful for the long haul, and written in Rust.
01 April 2025
Ever git pulled changes and wondered what they were? Here are two handy git CLI aliases that give you clarity on what changed.
25 November 2024
It's common to need a specific version of PostgreSQL installed for things like pg_dump in a Python docker project (which is often based on Debian). It's not hard, but it's easy to forget the exact steps, so I wanted to walk you through how to do it step by step.
09 November 2024
It's easy to have your pytest function's argument signatures explode with a bunch of fixture references. And sometimes you need things that depend on each other, both separately and together which can be hard to keep straight. I suggest using an object to contain them.
Small tip on making Tanstack Query (aka react-query) a little bit easier to use.
22 October 2024
Quotes around your tables got you down? Yeah me too. Creating, dropping or altering PostgreSQL objects with Python and psycopg is a bit tricky when it comes to identifiers like the names of databases, tables, and indexes.
16 October 2024
I was able to quickly transfer all of the assets in one bucket to another quickly with rclone
25 September 2023
The consequences of casually implementing changes in a work process with a "let's just try it" mindset. Discerning changes which are measurably positive or widely accepted by your team.
22 February 2023
A techinque to avoid prematurely optimizing your code and architecture.
30 January 2023
Allow employees to get emergency elevated credentials safely and accountably
14 January 2023
There are tons of Grafana and Helm tutorials out there, but I could not find any that did not use the default option of a Kubernetes persistent volume to store Grafana's data. It wasn't difficult, but wanted to document it here for the next person.
26 October 2022
k9s broke and only showing list of contexts. Turned out to be old EKS KUBECONFIG was the culprit
22 March 2020
Our brush with staph scalded skin syndrome during a pandemic.
10 February 2020
Installing Helm 2 into a namespace other than kube-system can be a little tricky to get right. Learn how to do it quickly and easily with an example.
14 April 2016
Does your USB Audio devices sometimes just cut out and stop working causing things like Spotify and YouTube videos to stop playing completely?
21 March 2016
A documentary about HQCC where I used to be a Board Member
09 March 2016
Easy way to display a Django template variable or show a default value.
01 March 2016
If you've been using Wagtail for awhile, this is an easy problem to run into but a hard one to find the solution to. TypeError: getattr(): attribute name must be string at related = getattr(model, self.relation_name).rel
22 January 2016
Kansas Legislature Website is unusable in Chrome. A browser with over 50% of marketshare.
29 November 2015
Frank discusses the specific steps he used to get ready to work for himself. Not necessarily a plan, but more a history of what worked for him.
16 September 2015
Working on a lot of Sphinx documentation? This PyPI module helps auto-rebuild your docs and includes livereload so you can more quickly see your changes.
13 September 2015
Suicide and other mental health problems are higher in tech workers than many other fields, yet we seem to recognize and do less than most professions.
04 December 2014
How to fix getting hash sum mismatch error when using apt-get
10 November 2014
Why carbon-cache having a 'FATAL start' with supervisor, isn't really an error.
30 April 2014
Interview with Frank Wiles, CEO - Grove.io on CrazyEngineers
10 April 2014
Handy shell tip for clearing the display without losing the current command you're typing.
02 April 2014
Quick HOWTO on setting up Mailgun with SaltStack
15 January 2014
Rant on how bad our government contracts have gotten.
04 November 2013
Using multiple pip requirements files with SaltStack
07 May 2013
A super easy mistake to make when working with a crontab file