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· 8 min read
Quentin Faidide

Cryptocurrencies have often been depicted as worthless in the public sphere, sometimes by reputable investors or public institutions officials.

While the boom of tokens and NFTs led to numerous malicious, hype-based, or overly ambitious projects that can legitimately be compared to Ponzi schemes, the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain projects solved real-world issues with innovative technology, unbeknownst to the general public.

This article is an attempt at explaining how these projects are technological and civilisational innovations, and to discuss their limits.

· 7 min read
Quentin Faidide

Windows implemented an antivirus scan which can prevent users from using most binaries by marking them as Trojan, unless they are signed with a cerficate.

It used to be necessary to pay a hefty fee and to send legal documents back and forth in order to get a certificate with a USB dongle to sign binaries. Microsoft since release Azure Trusted Signing, which makes that process a little easier.

This article will document the steps that are necessary to automatically sign your binaries with Azure Trusted Signing in Gitlab CI.

· 4 min read
Quentin Faidide

Markdown and Latex combined with the R statistical scripting language are a popular solution to generate documents with figures. It can be a huge productivty booster to be able to both model and report at the same time.

Nonetheless it's likely one day that you will come across a situation where you will need to programatically generate cells of code. There is a recent feature in the knitr package that provides basic component templating that I will walk readers through in this tutorial.

· 2 min read
Quentin Faidide

As I was writing an unpublished article about Cargo Cults in software engineering, I have started to reflect on the rules I enforce on myself.

There is one I really see no point in breaking. Surprising, online, not a lot of people discuss it, but I suspect it's because it's sort of obvious for anyone with a bit of experience. It is about always having a finite size limit on queries or responses. I figured out it would be worth sharing as a blog article.

· 5 min read
Quentin Faidide

The baseline cost for a managed Kubernetes cluster at Cloud providers is roughly 90$ to 210$ a month. At AWS and GCP, a good part of that cost is assigned to the control planes on which no workload is executed. If you're on the lookout for cheaper and scalable alternatives at less than 20$ with minimal maintenance, here is how to.

· 2 min read
Quentin Faidide

I recently tried to port a software to Windows, and some dependencies required the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ compiler. I therefore needed to use their version of cmake, vcpkg and ninja. I figured out that the best way to interract with these tools was through the Visual Studio Developer Powershell console. As I don't like Visual Studio, I figured out how to run its terminal inside vscode and will share the hack here.