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Power-up your DuckDuckGo searches with !bangs

DuckDuckGo continues to gain ground over Google for searches, not least because it doesn’t track you. But is it as efficient as Google, and how can you get more out of it? Here are 5 simple tips: Make use of !bangs DuckDuckGo has had bangs for years, though I only discovered them recently. Put simply, a bang allows you to perform a search directly on another site, from the DuckDuckGo site.

May 24, 2022 Read
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Welcome to v2 of michjnich.com

Welcome … … to v2 of my personal site. Version 1 was created using mkdocs and deployed on GitHub pages. Mkdocs is extremely simple to use and a powerful tool, but perhaps not ideal for a more “modern” looking site. While I could have run a blog using mkdocs, it wasn’t entirely practical, and it was for that reason I then set up a seperate tech blog site. stddev.tech This was actually pretty short lived, mainly because I used the hosted version of Ghost, which was quite expensive for somebody just running a small blog with only a handful of visitors, so when it came time to renew I found it hard to justify.

April 3, 2022 Read
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Remote working is not a zero-sum game!

This post was originally published on LinkedIn Wikipedia describes a zero sum game as: In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. It goes on to compare it with cutting a cake to share amongst a group.

February 25, 2021 Read
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What to do with your legacy monolith

This post was originally published on LinkedIn Are you working at a company that has a legacy monolith that you’d like to get rid of? Are you sure? Maybe you think you should migrate it to a microservice-based architecture? After all, that’s what all the cool kids are using these days, isn’t it? Before you do that, just stop and think a moment about what it is you actually need, and what problems you are trying to solve by considering what I presume would be a fairly major transformation project.

December 23, 2020 Read