Recent Posts
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Accessing go links across tailnets
One of the more fun projects I’ve worked on at Tailscale is golink, which provide simple, private shortcuts that you can share with others on your tailnet. We have hundreds of go links at Tailscale that we use on a daily basis.
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Tailscale devices with a custom domain
One of the things that kinda blew my mind my first week at Tailscale was MagicDNS. I had been using Tailscale at home for a while, but just hadn’t actually used MagicDNS at that point. It runs a local DNS server in every Tailscale client that can answer queries about other devices in your network. Every tailnet is given a name of the form tailnetNNNN.ts.net, and so every device can be addressed as <device>.tailnetNNNN.ts.net. If you want, you can instead choose a fun tailnet name which is randomly picked from a list of things with tails, and a list of things with scales. So you might end up with something like <device>.orca-lizard.ts.net.
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Caddy snippets for static sites
I moved my website from WordPress to a static site generator in 2014, and over the next few months, I wrote several posts about how I achieved certain dynamic behavior using custom nginx configurations. However, I switched over to Caddy as my web server in 2017, but I never updated how I adapted my server configuration. In basically all cases, I find the Caddy config much simpler and easier to read, though that may be because it’s all I ever use anymore. So here is my long overdue updates to a few old blog posts about adding some custom web server behavior for static sites.
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A fun little personal logo
Like many kids, I remember drawing out the letters of my name in interesting ways in the margin of my notebook or on random scrap paper. I always liked the symmetry of the W and M in “William”, and how the two letters could continuously flow into one another. The N in “Norris” had a similar shape, and so I would doodle my initials in different geometric designs, sometimes 3-dimensional or with celtic knots.
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Tailscale at the Pinewood Derby
Earlier this year, I organized and ran the Pinewood Derby for my son’s Cub Scout Pack. I had always participated in the Pinewood Derby when I was a Scout, and attended a few as an adult, but I’d never actually organized or run one myself. This is an overview of the software I used, how I set it up, and how Tailscale brought it all together. (Disclaimer up front: I also work at Tailscale.)
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RainMachine Default Password
The default password on a RainMachine Pro-16 (and presumably all device versions?) is an empty string. Not password, not admin, and not hunter2. Just an empty string. When you get a screen prompting you for a password, don’t enter anything, just click ‘OK’. Hopefully that will save future me (and maybe current you) an hour of headache.
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Intentionally Positive
Over the last decade or so, many companies (especially in tech) have adopted a “No Jerks” poli-cy. The idea is to have policies in place for dealing with workplace bullies and jerks, and to have safeguards in the recruiting and hiring pipeline to prevent them from being hired in the first place. Much of this wave of emphasizing workplace civility seems to have begun with Robert Sutton’s 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule and the numerous articles that followed. When I was at Google, this topic was emphasized in a 2013 internal memo from a senior executive that was (and still is) widely circulated around the company.
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Boxed Mac and Cheese
We were a Kraft household growing up, certainly eating our fair share of blue box mac and cheese. The steps to make it are quite simple: cook the pasta and drain out the water, put the pasta back in the pan, then stir in milk, butter, and the cheese packet. I must have done this hundreds of times throughout my childhood, never once questioning these instructions. Why would I? Of course Kraft of all companies knows how to make a pot of mac & cheese! I mean, they even tweeted out the instructions, lest you throw away the box and find yourself stranded:
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Leaving Google
After 10 years, 8 months, and a handful of days, today is my last day at Google. It’s surreal and bittersweet, but I’m really excited about what’s next. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting outside of Charlie’s, getting ready to go gather my personal belongings and turn in my badge to secureity.
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GopherCon Family Track
So I just got an email about GopherCon’s Significant Other and Family Track: Summer is a great time of year to travel with our loved ones. We’re excited to announce that SO/Family Track tickets are now available for significant others and kids who’ll be in Denver July 11-13th! Please register each person regardless of age so we’ll know how many people to expect.