Writing

A challenging moment for Minnesota brings out the best in Minnesota...and America.

The Internet is still what you want it to be. I want mine to be boring.

With a new mayor in Saint Paul, can we set aside incrementalism for bold thinking?

After a challenging year, warm wishes and higher hopes for a better 2026

AI tools can dramatically accelerate development, but that acceleration creates new risks. The speed dividend is only valuable if you take it as space, not just as more speed.

Even a solo project benefits from project management discipline. The practices that seem like "overhead" for a personal project are actually what let you ship.

You do not need to become a software developer to benefit from understanding how software development works. Here is what an accidental software developer learned—and why it might be useful to you, too.

AI-assisted development is not about letting the AI take the wheel. The value comes from your ability to direct it effectively, and to recognize when it is heading in the wrong direction.

In a disquieting year, the opportunity to quietly take stock of our blessings is valuable.

There is no shortage of opinions about AI, and those opinions meet operational realities in mission-driven nonprofit work. But where do aspirations, fears, and realities meet?

After migrating sites, it's time to send old posts off into the sunset.

Some new ideas and new features emerge on the site, just in time for the fall

Sometimes the best way to learn new deployment patterns is to build something completely ridiculous

In an attempt to give us a bit of levity, here are some of the major AI models' attempts at humor

Confused by uncertainty? Focus on what you can control with five strategies for professional resilience in turbulent times.

We're measuring how good an AI model is on vibes now. Or: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Reclaiming our digital autonomy through blogging? It's a powerful reminder that we can shape our online experience rather than being shaped by platforms.

Building out the recent posts list to include direct links to posts on the old blog, while ignoring them if that post exists here

Something old, something new: A new chapter begins for edwardjensen.net

With warm wishes and high hopes for the New Year 2025, and for peace and certainty in challenging and uncertain times

An automated way to send emails from new senders in Office 365 to a separate folder

An invitation for a new podcast? The 10th anniversary of The Downtown Phoenix Podcast has me in a ruminative mood

With warm wishes and high hopes for a happy New Year 2024

A little-known PaperCut feature on translating and transforming card formats. Perfect if you’ve just built or rebuilt your PaperCut infrastructure

"In today’s Friday Five: Some thoughts for IT administrators on giving tools to their users to make security-conscious decisions"

Breaking down a new tactic for phishing attempts: getting users to scan a QR code on their phone to bypass corporate security

With the first snow of the 2023-2024 winter upon us, I took the opportunity last weekend to get some autumn photos around downtown Saint Paul, Summit Avenue, and Cathedral Hill.

A Minneapolis connection for the composer of the Independence Day soundtrack: John Philip Sousa

In which we merge two controversial topics: Generative AI and…anchovies on pizza??

IT leaders and practitioners are often compelled to do more with less. But what if we leveraged tools to help us do more...with more?

Microsoft Planner can be so perfect if it had a few extra things. But for now, there's PowerShell

Back in January, we started down the path of migrating from an on-premises version of PaperCut to their cloudy PaperCut Hive. Even after you read the papers and technical guides, sometimes you just get it wrong.

Today marks a year since I moved to Minnesota. In this special edition of The Friday Five(-ish), here are some photos from the past year

A return of the Friday Five and some of my observations on PaperCut Hive, a software stack I'm currently deploying

Are we standing at the front door to a blogging renaissance?

With a new year comes a new way of thinking about things. Here are five thoughts as we stand at the doorway of 2023…

About a decade ago, the Phoenix architect Taz Khatri gave the urbanist Yuri Artibise an "exit interview" of sorts. I adapt the formula here

As it's been a few months now, I guess I should fill in my blog readers (all four of you) of some major news

In this installment of The Friday Five, it's time to dust off the slides and update A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix

The 15 January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano had some interesting effects felt thousands of miles away

"Want a rolling feed of National Weather Service warnings and watches for an area? Check out the IEMBot Monitor!"

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing: A Grafana dashboard for weather data for midtown Phoenix? Oh yes.

The past year has brought upheaval, but it’s given me a good space to rethink my computing portfolio.

In light of our collective cultural conversations about public space, midtown Phoenix’s Steele Indian School Park must be a part of it. Here’s why

On June 24, prior to its closing, I traveled up to Metrocenter to take some final photos. Here are a few of them

The closure of north-central Phoenix's Metrocenter was announced. Some final thoughts on what was and what might be with the space

As video calls have taken a bigger spot in our lives in the past few weeks, here are some cheap and easy ways to up your video call game.