Black Hat USA 2015

I'm attending Black Hat 2015 USA. This is my first time at Black Hat or any other security related conference and here are my first impressions.

My favorite book for agile teams

Whenever I have worked with teams or Scrum Masters there has always been one book that I have recommended them to read. And now I'm happy to see that it has been updated.

How to not run an organization - the CIA version

I stumbled over this document dating back to World War 2 where the predecessor to CIA, the Office for Strategic Services issued a field manual on how to sabotage. Especially interesting are the sections on general interference with organizations and production.

Are you burning up or down?

You have probably heard the term burn-down and burn-up when referring to two different ways of tracking progress against some target in agile projects. but have you heard about the enhanced burn-down?

The Microservice is not what it seems to be

The microservice hype where every application that uses a service should be implemented as a series of microservices is a little unhealthy. Like most technologies; if you don't know what you are getting yourself into there will be problems...

TOP not only for SELECT

I actually never considered the case that the TOP clause in SQL can be used for other tings than SELECT. But is it really a realistic use-case?

The social circuit breaker

The same way I have applied ideas from agile development to other random situations like moving from one country to another I have come to realize that there is a pattern that I should apply. I call it the social circuit breaker.

Timetravel in C# done right

Testing things where you need to fake time is not hard given the right abstractions. That is why when I read this article I felt really sad. Because while the article describes one way to fake time it does so by breaking three fundamentals which is pretty hard in three lines of relevant code...

Asynchronous enumerations - again

Almost 2 years ago I wrote about this problem with accessing data from Azure and returning it in a LINQ friendly way. Well not long ago the discussion came up again only this time it was in regard to access data in a Cassandra cluster.

Returning 403 or 404 - that is the question

I think it is safe to say that anybody who is serious about security will tell you that security through obscurity is no security. Yet a lot of people think obscuring is a great way to increase security like for example return 404 rather than 403 on REST APIs when the caller does not have rights to retrieve an existing resource.