Programming on thesamosborne

Free VPNs in 9 Different Countries

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 17:27:35 -0800

Apparently the BBC doesn’t let you watch their TV shows if you’re not in the UK. I was trying to watch This Country but I was greeted with this prohibiting banner:

No worries, I have a subscription to Nord VPN and they have servers in the UK. I switched my location to the UK and reloaded the page. No luck:

I read their help page and they have some VPN tracking software in place that seems like it blocked most of Nord’s IP addresses already.

How I Use My Free Azure Credit 💸

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 18:43:56 +0700

Microsoft has a program for all engineer employees to get some free Azure credit to play with. Having been with Microsoft for two summer internships I have accumulated two separate accounts with $150 of credit/month each. Growing up pinching pennies, I am not one to let anything free go to waste, so for the past couple years I have been using my Azure credit for some fun stuff.

1. NextCloud Personal Cloud Storage

NextCloud is super cool if you haven’t heard of it. It’s basically open-source Dropbox with some extra features, and you can self-host it. When I got my free credit, I thought I’d try and save some money on Dropbox by self-hosting NextCloud on Azure. Here’s what I used:

My First Attempt at Building a Web App

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 19:34:46 +0700

One of my college courses required me to build an application as a semester long project. I wanted to build an application that could solve a real world problem. I had heard about a problem that doctors were having from a friend of mine. Doctors get sued. A lot. 75% of doctors in low-risk specialties have faced a malpractice claim at some point in their careers. For doctors in high-risk specialties, that number skyrockets to 99%. I decided to make a webapp to help doctors solve this problem. You can check it out here: patientpreviewapp.com

My First Dev Job

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:34:03 +0700

** This post didn’t really take shape like I was hoping. I might come back later and rearrange it to be more coherent, but as it currently stands it is an imperfect combination of memoir/note to former self/love letter to my workplace. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I would have never hired myself. Bless the people who threw me a bone and let me learn to be a programmer at their expense.

After sophomore year of my CS program, I was looking around for a job that would put my years (two is still plural) of programming “experience” to work. I thought that by going to school and half paying attention in my classes that counted as experience. I was wrong. The first two years of college did not at all prepare me to work on a real dev team as I would soon find out.