Posts on Neil Hanlon

I Violated the Geneva Conventions by Implementing Kerberos in TypeScript

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:40:00 -0400

A couple weeks ago I shipped a swamp workflow that tells me what Fedora wants from me on a given day. Three models fan out in parallel, pull bugs and builds and package state, and one command writes a markdown snapshot I can diff against last week’s. It’s the workflow I wanted, and it runs every time I have the spoons for it.

Two of the three models are pure fetch, and carry no external dependencies. The third isn’t. The FASJSON service speaks only Kerberos/GSSAPI: every endpoint requires WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate, and there’s no password or token fallback of any kind. The standard answer (the one every integration I’ve ever seen uses) is to shell out: kinit, then curl --negotiate, and now your model depends on a subprocess, an ambient credential cache, and whether the machine happens to have krb5-workstation installed.

What Does Fedora Want From Me Today?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:54:48 -0400

I began contributing as a packager with Fedora a few years ago, in concert with my participation in founding and bootstrapping Rocky Linux from the ground up. That alone deserves a blog post series I may write some day… but more to the point… I haven’t done a great job of maintaining my packages. There’s a host of reasons I could get into for why, but particularly in light of having a newborn and therefore much more limited time and energy than I ever thought was possible, optimizing my workflows and maximizing my impact (and reducing ownership of things where needed) are the most powerful knobs I can use to make the greatest difference not just in Fedora but across all the things I involve myself with.

I Put My Son in a Swamp

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:45:00 -0400

My son is a typed resource now. He has a sync method that pulls the last seven days of his life into a versioned snapshot, a stack of reports that summarize how he slept and ate, and — I did think about this — a delete that’s careful to be idempotent, because deleting the same diaper twice shouldn’t be an error.

I did not set out to put a baby in a swamp. It followed, the way these things do, from having already put everything else in one.

The WiFi Certificate That Didn't Exist an Hour Ago

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:30:00 -0400

My laptop is on WiFi right now on a certificate that didn’t exist an hour ago. I made the keypair, my own CA signed it, the private key went into my secret store, and the machine authenticated onto the 802.1X network and pulled a DHCP lease — all through code I’d finished writing about twenty minutes earlier. I want to talk about the boring part that made it safe, because the boring part is the only part I’d defend.

Joining ResolveX as a Technical Advisor: Infrastructure and Crisis Response

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 10:17:20 -0400

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined ResolveX as a technical advisor. ResolveX builds software and data solutions for crisis call centers—988 suicide prevention lines, domestic violence hotlines, and other critical mental health resources.

Why This Matters

Mental health crisis response has significant gaps that technology can help address. ResolveX builds tools to make crisis counselors more effective and help researchers understand patterns that could prevent crises.

They serve 988 operators—resource-constrained nonprofits handling life-or-death situations. The technical requirements are unique: rock-solid reliability, security for sensitive mental health data, and cost-effectiveness for organizations that measure impact in lives saved.

Smarthome Soldering Iron with Home Assistant and ESPHome (also: web GUIs for Pinecil)

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 19:01:25 -0400

About a year ago, wesdottoday told me to buy a Pinecil and, once they came back in stock before the holidays.. I did just that… Fast forward a couple months and I’ve got a copr for flashing the Pinecil’s firmware (IronOS), and am spending my weekends playing around with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Home Assistant to automatically turn on my fan when I start tinkering at my desk, lest my lungs die from the fumes.