Posts

How to Import a Postman Collection (and Where to Set Your Environment Variables)

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Postman is heavily used in backend development, but if you've only ever built requests by hand, two features make a huge difference once you find them: importing a shared collection so you're not rebuilding requests from scratch, and variables, which let you swap out values (URLs, IDs, tokens) without hardcoding them into every request. This post covers both. If you want to see them in action end-to-end — including chaining data between requests with the Collection Runner — I've got a video walkthrough linked at the bottom. Importing a Collection: You don't have to build a collection from scratch if someone's already shared one — you can import it directly. Postman Desktop Application 1. In Postman, click Import (top left, or File → Import). 2. A popup window will appear where you can paste in a URL, paste raw text (like a cURL command), or select a file. For example, paste the raw GitHub URL of a .json collection — like the   URL Collection Link below  from my vide...
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The Lethal Trifecta: How Your Helpful AI Agent Becomes a Hacker's Best Friend (Beginner Friendly)

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I just wrapped up a training video on something that has been on my mind since I first learned about it: the AI lethal trifecta .  It's something that most AI security professionals know about, however it really is something everyone should know and it's an easy concept to grasp!  Knowing about it could save your entire company from a data breach or worse.  Picture an HVAC coordinator who has too many emails and not enough time in the day so she sets up her Claude desktop agent to respond to customer emails with available dates. Customer emails come in, Claude reads them, checks the company calendar for open slots, and emails back some available times.  This was one of the biggest time sucks of her job. It's a genuinely great use case. She's excited about her new workflow.  It's also, without anyone doing anything wrong, a perfect setup for the lethal trifecta and a hacker to get access to some very sensitive data.  What makes this a Lethal Trifecta? It's...
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Why (and How) I Built a Personal Digital Business Card with Claude in 10 Minutes

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I recently signed up for a business networking event, even though I don't own a business, because I wanted to meet people outside the usual tech meetups. The event confirmation email said to bring a business card. A business card? I thought. It's just me — I'm not selling a business. But then I remembered a talk I went to early in my career, given by a powerhouse entrepreneur, about personal branding and how it's so vital for everyone to be able to sell themselves in their career. I looked at what was already out there for digital business cards — scan a QR code and call it done. Except that QR code points to someone else's server, someone else's branding, someone else's app they now have to download. I already have a website. I didn't want a third-party middleman standing between me and the person I just met. So I built my own with Claude. It's a page on my own site — vanessahenson.com/businesscard — with a QR code that scans straight to...
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Keeping Your Claude Local Agent Secure Claude Code: Security Hardening  Why should you care about hardening your Claude? Because you don’t want to be the developer whose Claude caused a catastrophic outage if your machine got compromised. 🙀 The following config won’t prevent every attack, but it significantly reduces the blast radius of a compromised session, malicious prompt injection, or a rogue dependency. Security is an ongoing practice and as AI advances so will recommendations. It is extremely  important now to add layers of defense. By setting up an extra layer of protection your agent won't be able to accomplish tasks that can cause massive financial consequences. That extra layer of protection means your agent physically can't reach for operations with real financial consequences: deleted data, leaked credentials, blown-away infrastructure.  Pre-req: Sandbox Setup (Quick Start) If you’re not familiar with sandboxes or permi...
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Co-Creation . . . Finding Your AI Sweet Spot.

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AI is not just for highly technical people. It truly is beneficial for almost everyone. It's not just deepfakes and chatbots; it really can help you be more productive. It can co-write emails, sales pitches, business plans, Instagram blurbs, a dating app bio, a mission statement, heck, even a funny joke to text a friend. The list is truly endless.   (This article focuses on AI writing generation, but the prompting techniques are the foundational pieces that are applicable to all AI generation.) This doesn't mean it replaces you, ...quite the opposite, in fact. It helps you articulate your thoughts or gather correct information. Here are some tips and tricks to help you navigate:   It needs your touch and your voice Don't just copy and paste what AI tells you. Often, the first pass is bloated, overly complicated, and overwhelming."  We still have to massage the data (or the prompt) to be human-digestible. If you wouldn't write it or read it with compl...
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LLM MCP and Agents Oh My.

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  LLMs, ML, NLP, MCPs, RAG, Agents, and MCP Servers . . . the list goes on and on and how the heck is anyone supposed to keep up? Every day a new model, tool or term is introduced it's daunting trying to understand how much you need to learn about them.  Don't worry it's not nearly as scary as it sounds! Once you grasp the fundamental concepts, you will start to see the patterns and how most of the new terms fall into general categories. Then you can pick and choose what works best in your workflow. So take a deep breath, and lets put this in very basic terms to help you grasp the foundational picture. Keep in mind that each of these terms and topics can go very deep, but for most of us, you really only need a general understanding of what these things do in order to become more proficient in AI.  LLM - Large Language Model:   This is where the magic happens  - the brains of the operation. They can be generalized knowledge ( Chat GPT ) or very specifically ...
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Are you letting AI control you?

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AI, It's incredible how two letters can bring up so much emotion.  Excitement for the new advances we can make as a society, the potential for people to make more money then they ever dreamed possible, power, scarcity, and worst of all - Fear. I doubt there is a space that isn't being changed by the introduction of this technology. It is a tsunami that is hitting the entire world and whether we like it or not it's coming straight for us.  It was only a few short years ago when being a Programmer was number one job on the US News 100 best job list. I felt like I had finally "made it" and it was an incredible feeling. Being in such a highly coveted position, finally achieving the success that I had earned through endless hours of studying, late nights, long on call shifts, tears, headaches, self help and therapy journeys to overcome the soul crushing imposter syndrome. I remember the pride I felt reading that article thinking it was all worth it because I was finall...
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