Grant Winney

Is there anything more satisfying than sharing knowledge? Of teaching someone and witnessing their "ah ha" moment? I hope you found something here today that led to your very own "ah ha" moment! 💡

Articles of Grant Winney

Apr 04, 2020

13 addons to power up your GitHub game

GitHub is an amazing set of tools around Git, but it's lacking in certain areas. Where it fails to impress, browser addons often pick up the slack. Here's 13 addons (plus a few honorable mentions) that will take your GitHub experience to the next level!...

mvp winforms unit testing automated testing continuous integration tech

Mar 10, 2020

Yes, it's possible to test a WinForms app... using MVP

If you find yourself supporting a WinForms application, you're likely to notice the tests... or lack thereof. Just because we may not have been so focused on automated tests and continuous integration when WinForms was younger, that doesn't mean we can't introduce them now. Better late than never!...

google analytics privacy googlexit tech

Mar 09, 2020

Replacing Google Analytics, respecting user privacy, and owning your data

If you just want simple stats about your blog or site (i.e. popular pages and referrals), you don't need Google Analytics - the data is already on your server! You just need a tool that can display it nicely for you, and there's a number of privacy-minded alternatives....

google calendar tech

Feb 27, 2020

How to find the iCal address for a public Google calendar

Behind every great Google calendar URL is an equally amazing iCal file. Here's how to find it....

web browser css tech

Feb 13, 2020

How to make a dark theme for your blog that automatically adjusts for your visitors

Every time I learn some new piece of CSS I'm amazed at how flexible and powerful it is. Like how easy it is to tailor your site for your visitor's "dark mode" preference!...

internet historical

Jan 25, 2020

The Start of the Web

Over the years, servers moved around, systems were reformatted, files were lost... history became legend, legend became myth and for two and a half decades, the first page passed out of all knowledge until, when chance came in 2013, it was rehosted at its original domain. And there it remains......

privacy data amazon facebook linkedin reflection

Jan 21, 2020

Sharing is Caring

These days, it seems like the modern business's purpose, reduced to a single point, is to separate you from your data. And as it happens, I stumbled across several instances of data mining wrapped up as "features" just last week....

api rest requestbin tech carousel

Jan 05, 2020

How to deploy your own private RequestBin instance in under 5 minutes

If you need to consume a webhook from another service, or verify the payload being sent from your own REST API endpoint, RequestBin can help. It intercepts and displays the contents of any call made to it. Here's how to deploy your own private instance in just a few minutes....

Experience gets you far, but finding good tools and services can get you much further. Here are some of my favorites:

DigitalOcean is a versatile, affordable cloud provider. You can serve up a blog (like this one!), deploy a wiki, try out ansible, or do something much bigger. They host the annual Hacktoberfest too.

Cloudinary is an image and video management platform, which freed me from my dependency on YouTube to host videos on this site.