Author Archives: Timothy Chien (blog)

Impostor syndrome

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I kind of missed my blogging target last year, because I didn’t feel I am in the right place. A place where I have some authority to talk about a few more things.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that’s exactly how it feels like to be an impostor.

It is said, the impostor syndrome is a good thing. It’s a form of self-awareness, it helps you by allowing you to step back and understand your limits and find the ways to improve yourself. Blah Blah Blah. We all heard about it, and we all talked about it when wanted to give our friends some encouragement. Still, it’s harder to acknowledge that when you experience the impostor syndrome yourself.

It didn’t come at the right time either, as I have experienced a lot of life changes lately. The dust, unfortunately, won’t settle until later part of this year. I will share more when I can.

Thank you for reading a rant from an impostor.

 

Programming 101: Learn English

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@muanchiou shared this wonderful talk on Twitter. The talk mentioned a lot of things I have tired of organizing them into words, because of the things I mentioned on Twitter:

Thank you very much for sharing this. It’s a sad reality but it’s a reality need to be told. I’ve find it hard to talk about this without people from both sides getting defensive so I stopped talking. Maybe I should — start by sharing this.

If you work with non-native English speakers or online/technical communities at any capacity, I highly recommend watching this 15 minutes talk.

Forget about /etc/hosts and use proxy.pac

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I hate to touch /etc/hosts myself when a project asks me to do so as part of development setup. Tools like Vagrant use zeroconfig/Bonjour to dispatch a .local hostname, but no one seems to remember the ancient, all-mighty Proxy auto-config.

Proxy auto-config allows you to setup hostname and URL mapping in JavaScript. It’s supported on every OS and browser. To use that to setup your own development hostname, you would first need to write a PAC file:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
    if (host === 'calypso.localhost') {
        return 'PROXY 127.0.0.1:3000';
    }
    return "DIRECT";
}

The example above points calypso.localhost to 127.0.0.1, as required by the Calypso project. Next, save this file as a private Gist, and get the raw, private, HTTPS URL.

You can file the place to put that URL in the Proxy setting section of your OS, for example, this is how to do it on macOS. Now, open any browser, the hostname should correctly connect to the IP address specified (Firefox comes with it’s own Proxy setting allowing you to specify a PAC, so if you would like the setting to affect only one browser, use Firefox).

This is the simplest way to use a PAC file. The Wikipedia article lists several other use cases for PAC files.

Important considerations

  • Use your own PAC file. I didn't share my PAC file hosting on Gist because you should never trust me nor anyone else for that. PAC file has the potential to redirect all your network traffic.
  • Turn off PAC auto-discovery. It rely on the expired WPAD protocol to discover PAC file served on your local subnet, but implementation hardly know the boundary of your local domain (it could by checking the Public Suffix list but that list changes almost monthly). Thankfully the good folks at WPADblock initiative secured a few public hostnames that could be exploited.

I hope you find this trick useful.