A few weeks ago, a colleague showed me a small Sinatra application they had written to share small bits of sensitive text without any preconditions on the recipient. The application, which is very nicely branded as Onceler, will accept a small text snippet, store it in memory, and give the uploader a unique URL from which the secret can be downloaded. The recipient then visits the URL, which causes the secret to be downloaded, displayed, and deleted from the server’s memory.

As you might have surmised from the time elapsed since my most recent post, I have not been keeping up with my goal to write more regularly. I believe this is because I set content goals that were both too specific to be easily met and too vague to make coming up with posts and pages any easier. Neither “short tutorials related to personal projects” nor “reviews of technical books I’ve read and reacted strongly to” inspires much enthusiasm in me as a writer from week to week, so this site has mostly languished, barren and unread.

This past year has been a time of transition for me. Last August, I moved from the AWS client tools team to AWS Ground Station and from Washington State to Washington, D.C. After getting to work with some extraordinary people to see Ground Station evolve from an idea to a preview to a generally available AWS service, I decided to seek a position at the US Digital Service, where I’ll be starting work next Monday.