Jesse Houwing
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jessehouwing.net
Jesse Houwing
@jessehouwing.net
Loves Charlotte and Lily & Mika. Works at Xebia. Scrum.org, Github and Microsoft Trainer
Found a funny bug in Garmin... My Fenix 8 had adjusted to local time in San Francisco after my flight yesterday, but also decided it should still apply European Winter Time. So I woke up to my Phone and my Watch being in disagreement. One more manual sync with Connect fixed it.

@garmin.com
October 26, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
xkcd in 2025
October 15, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Join me at #githubuniverse! You can find me at the Xebia booth throughout the event. Don't hesitate to ping me if you want to talk about GitHub Enterprise, Actions Security or rolling out GitHub Copilot in your organization.

#xebia 💜 @github.com 🌉 Universe
October 9, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Managing Cost Center in GitHub is currently something only an Enterprise or Billing Administrator can do. We wanted Org
Owners and Repo Admins to be able to set this too.

I achieve this by combining Custom Properties and PowerShell in an Actions Workflow.

jessehouwing.net/github-billi...
GitHub Billing - Let Organization and Repository admins set the Cost Center in GitHub
We rely on GitHub Cost Centers to split the GitHub bill across the different entities that make up our company. What resource is tied to which cost center is managed in the GitHub Enterprise Settings.
jessehouwing.net
September 24, 2025 at 8:59 AM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
i don’t think people on bluesky understand the severity of this situation.

i woke up to literally hundreds of texts from friends and family thinking about either moving back home to india or applying to other countries for jobs. this includes me.
Those on an H1B cannot return to the US from tomorrow (Sunday) unless paying $100K. This is an out-of-the blue presidential action. We’ll see software engineers stranded abroad.

One easy to predict outcome: those on US visas will travel less… for work, for conferences etc.
September 20, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
Thousands of women are sharing this and saying yes, this was their experience, many of them sharing their own horrific 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s experiences. (And almost everyone sharing it appears to be female.)
September 14, 2025 at 1:34 AM
So I cut the connector off a 32/7 AWG UTP cable to feed it through a wall. Turns out I can't find any replacement connectors to put on the cut-off end. Problem is it's a REALLY thin cable. 4mm in total.

Tips anyone?

#networking #ubiquity #unifi
September 6, 2025 at 6:20 PM
You may have heard of the nx project being hacked last week. This could happen to you too if you use GitHub Actions. Learn how to configure your policies to prevent this.

Here are 14 things you should know about GitHub Actions and should apply today.

jessehouwing.net/github-actio...
GitHub Actions learnings from the recent nx hack
You may have seen recent reporting around the compromise of the nx project. A malicious version of their package was published to npmjs which subsequently published GitHub tokens, crypto wallets and o...
jessehouwing.net
September 3, 2025 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
Check this shit out motherfucker

*embargoes own country*
August 27, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Something to keep an eye on. If you rely on anything that relies on nx, check your system.

www.aikido.dev/blog/popular...
Popular nx packages compromised on npm
The popular nx package on npm was compromised, and stolen data was published on GitHub publicly
www.aikido.dev
August 27, 2025 at 10:37 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
Something I always say is that so many of the pedestrian vs. e-bike/bike conflicts arise because all of these people are sharing a small sliver of space. But what if it wasn't that way? What if we took more real estate away from cars, thus allowing *everyone* to have a safe space to move?
August 25, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
VS Code: the open source AI editor. Starting today.
June 30, 2025 at 4:10 PM
When searching for flying ant, the first results, including bing and google ai results are on how to extinguish. Often citing 'home remedies' and followed by poisons.

Same for dandelions. Or garden mice, wasps, hornets, clover, lice spiders.

Little on their use, beauty, importance. Change needed!
June 30, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
🚀 The official Azure DevOps MCP is here! It includes an extensive set of tools you can use with GitHub Copilot to interact with Azure DevOps directly from Visual Studio Code.

🔗 Get to know more about the Azure DevOps MCP here: github.com/microsoft/az...

#AzureDevOps #mcp #MVPBuzz
GitHub - microsoft/azure-devops-mcp: The MCP server for Azure DevOps, bringing the power of Azure DevOps directly to your agents.
The MCP server for Azure DevOps, bringing the power of Azure DevOps directly to your agents. - microsoft/azure-devops-mcp
github.com
June 13, 2025 at 10:10 AM
Figured out how to authenticate to Azure using Microsoft Graph in @github.com Actions.

Using Azure login to grab the token and passing that to Connect-MgGraph.

jessehouwing.net/authenticate...
Authenticate Connect-MgGraph using OIDC in GitHub Actions
I'm running a number of maintenance scripts against our Azure EntraId to manage GitHub related things. Removing dormant users, asking users to setup their notification email correctly etc. For a long...
jessehouwing.net
June 10, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
WATCH: “Trump misrepresented the facts. This is not even in South Africa.”

@france24 does the fact-check on Trump’s Oval Office “White Genocide” Oval Office ambush 🇺🇸 networks haven’t.

Lies, outdated footage, etc.

Full: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mti6...
May 22, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
Detecting malicious Unicode
In a recent educational trick, curl contributor James Fuller submitted a pull-request to the project in which he suggested a larger cleanup of a set of scripts. In a later presentation, he could show us how not a single human reviewer in the team nor any CI job had spotted or remarked on one of the changes he included: he replaced an ASCII letter with a Unicode alternative in a URL. This was an eye-opener to several of us and we decided we needed to up our game. We are the curl project. We can do better. ## GitHub The replacement symbol looked identical to the ASCII version so it was not possible to visually spot this, but the diff viewer knows there is a difference. In this GitHub website screenshot below I reproduced a similar case. The right-side version has the Latin letter ‘g’ replaced with the Armenian letter co. They appear to be the same. GitHub shows a diff. But what is actually the difference? The diff viewer says there is a difference but as a human it isn’t possible to detect what it is. Is it a flaw? Does it matter? If done “correctly”, it would be done together with a _real_ and expected fix. The impact of changing one or more letters in a URL can of course be devastating depending on conditions. When I flagged about this rather big omission to GitHub people, I got barely no responses at all and I get the feeling the impact of this flaw is not understood and acknowledged. Or perhaps they are all just too busy implementing the next AI feature we don’t want. ## Warnings When we discussed this problem on Mastodon earlier this week, Viktor Szakats provided me with an example screenshot of doing a similar stunt with Gitea which quite helpfully highlights that there is something special about the replacement: Gitea warns that the replacement is using “ambiguous Unicode characters” I have been told that some of the other source code hosting services also show similar warnings. As a user, I would actually like to know even more than this, but at least this warns about the proposed change clearly enough so that if this happens I would get the code manually and investigate before accepting such a change. ## Detect While we wait for GitHub to wake up and react (which I have no expectation will actually happen anytime soon), we have implemented checks to help us poor humans spot things like this. _To detect malicious Unicode._ We have added a CI job that scans all files and validates every UTF-8 sequence in the git repository. In the curl git repository most files and most content are plain old ASCII so we can “easily” whitelist a small set of UTF-8 sequences and some specific files, the rest of the files are simply not allowed to use UTF-8 at all as they will then fail the CI job and turn up red. In order to drive this change home, we went through all the test files in the curl repository and made sure that all the UTF-8 occurrences were instead replaced by other kind of escape sequences and similar. Some of them were also used more or less by mistake and could easily be replaced by their ASCII counterparts. The next time someone tries this stunt on us it could be someone with less good intentions, but now ideally our CI will tell us. ## Confusables There are plenty of tools to find similar-looking characters in different Unicode sets. One of them is provided by the Unicode consortium themselves: https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp ## Reactive This was yet another security-related fix _reacting_ on a demonstrated problem. I am sure there are plenty more problems which we have not yet thought about nor been shown and therefore we do not have adequate means to detect and act on automatically. We want and strive to be proactive and tighten everything _before_ malicious people exploit some weakness somewhere but security remains this never-ending race where we can only do the best we can and while _the other side_ is working in silence and might at some future point attack us in new creative ways we had not anticipated. That future unknown attack is a tricky thing.
daniel.haxx.se
May 16, 2025 at 7:10 AM
Walked 2 groups through GitHub Copilot Agent features in Visual Studio Code to show what the future of coding might look like.

With that we contributed about 100 people to this World Record. And had a lot of fun while doing it.

#AISkillsFest
May 1, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Call for Speakers for @GitHub Universe 2025 ends tomorrow. What topic would you want to see a session on? Let me know!

Are there speakers you'd love to see there? You can nominate them too!

#github #githubuniverse #mvpbuzz
May 1, 2025 at 1:27 PM
GitHub recently released documentation on all the large language models available in @github.com Copilot. The list is ever expanding. But its hard to pick the right model for the task.

I wanted to make it easier, so I asked Copilot to suggest the right model:

jessehouwing.net/github-copil...
Picking the right GitHub Copilot model
GitHub recently released documentation on all the large language models available in GitHub Copilot. The list is ever expanding, especially when you have previews turned on for your account. But its s...
jessehouwing.net
April 25, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Still a few places available on the upcoming Scrum with Kanban class. Does your management crave more "predictable delivery", but has "estimating better" failed every time you tried? Join my class!

www.scrum.org/courses/prof...
Professional Scrum with Kanban
The PSK training is perfect forPSK is perfect for you if you use Scrum to deliver products to market. Are you a Scrum Master aspiring to improve performance with flow techniques? A Product Owner explo...
www.scrum.org
April 23, 2025 at 10:13 AM
Took a while to figure this one out... The one id isn't the other I'd it seems.

Now we can create a hierarchy or issues in @github.com using the GitHub CLI.

jessehouwing.net/create-githu...
Create GitHub issue hierarchy using the API
The newly introduced GitHub Issues updates have added support for issue types as well as parent-child hierarchies. Unfortunately, the GitHub CLI hasn't yet been updated to support setting up this tree...
jessehouwing.net
April 16, 2025 at 8:26 PM
This year I'm going to hike up another mountain to support @cliniclowns.bsky.social. Passo Stelvio in Italy this year!

You can sponsor me and all the money will be towards Cliniclowns.

You can support me directly on my sponsor page:
www.alpentocht.nl/2025/deelnem...
Jesse Houwing
www.alpentocht.nl
April 16, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by Jesse Houwing
GitHub Copilot updates to check out:

🔹 GPT-4.1 now in public preview
🔹 GitHub Actions token integration in GitHub Models is GA — no more PATs!
Try them out 👨‍💻⚡

📎 github.blog/changelog/20...
📎 github.blog/changelog/20...

#GitHub #Copilot #DevTools #AI
OpenAI GPT-4.1 now available in public preview for GitHub Copilot and GitHub Models · GitHub Changelog
OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4.1, is now available in GitHub Copilot and GitHub Models, bringing OpenAI’s newest model to your coding workflow. This model outperforms GPT-4o across the board, with major...
github.blog
April 15, 2025 at 10:16 AM