Fulcrum’s been the best tool out there for quite a few years for building your own apps and collecting data with mobile forms (we were doing low-code before it was cool). Our product focus for a long time was on making it as simple and as fast as possible to go from ideas to reality to get working on a data collection process. For any sort of work you would’ve previously done with a pen and paper, or a spreadsheet on a tablet, you can rapidly build and deploy a Fulcrum app to your team for things like inspections, audits,...

I posted a couple weeks ago about moving much of my computing activity to the iPad full time. Part of what I had to crack to make that possible was a writing workflow that supported using the tools I prefer, and a method for publishing and previewing with Jekyll.

I’ve been using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for this site for 5+ years. Other CMS systems are interesting and getting better, but there’s something about the total control and simplicity of static sites that keeps me here. This workflow is great with a full Mac setup, but on...

As computing platforms get more complex and critical to daily life, maintaining secure usage gets more challenging.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s a known mantra in the product and IT space that security and usability are inversely proportional. That is, a gain in one is a loss in the other. This has long been visible in enterprise software that is perceived as annoying or frictional in the pursuit of security (password rotation every n days, can’t reuse, complexity requirements). It’s what gives employees a bad taste in their mouth about enterprise systems,...

⚗️ Amazon Announces AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics. You simply point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata

Interesting new service from AWS (is there a need in computing they don’t cover at this point?), providing serverless ETL transformations on datasets hosted anywhere. The automatic discovery is particularly interesting for applications dealing in highly variable data structures.