Vanessa Henson

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...

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...

  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 ...

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...

I wanted to make my own day a little more fun so I added a Mario Bro's vine sound on all of my repos when I make commits. I'm sure there are many ways to go about it but here is how I did it on a Mac.   *Note this way works only when you do not have a local post-commit file in your repo if you need both global and local it looks like the steps are a little trickier see this   stack overflow  for more details.  You could always use a different git hook as well.  1. Enable git templates: git config --global init.templatedir '~/.git-templates' 2. Create a directory to hold the global hooks: mkdir -p ~/.git-templates/hooks 4. Add the hook file .   (post-commit or whatever git hook file you want) touch  ~/.git-templates/hooks/post-commit *Important do not add the .sh file type or it will run 5. Make sure the hook is executable. chmod a+x ~/.git-templates/hooks/post-commit 6. Add your sound file to the global hooks folder (~.git-template/hook...

A lot of people have trouble finding their voice at work. Individuals that have people pleasing tendencies struggle to speak up because they don't want to appear mean or have issues with anxiety.  Recently I had a fellow programmer ask me how to address a situation that required the courage to speak up at work.  It got me thinking about my own journey into finding my voice.  Sadly it took me getting to the point of feeling burned out and completely undervalued to finally have the courage to speak up.  It really was a turning point for me in my career. I realized that I could no longer care if I failed, or had the wrong solution.  I was going to speak up and have my voice heard. It started out a little rough but it has certainly gotten easier over time. I was very much out of my comfort zone when I started (if I'm being honest there are still times when it's hard).  I struggled to articulate myself and it came across as rash and unrefined. I started research...

It’s a wonderful time to be alive. There is so much focus on Female/LGQTB/Minority empowerment and diversity. It's great knowing that there are so many strong and powerful people out there blazing the trail of the path less traveled. What amazing role models we have like Grace Hopper ,   Isis Anchalee ,   Susan Fowler , LGBTQ Leaders , as well as many unsung heroes who have braved the trenches everyday. People who have walked the truly hard path and endured bullying, harassment and self doubt in order to make tech a better place for the rest of us. I have not experienced such extreme experiences but it is my hope that the more people who share their stories it will help to truly create an inclusive environment at work. As a woman in tech I have had a long journey and it has not been an easy path. I feel incredibly blessed that I found some teams where I was accepted as an equal teammate rather than just the “girl developer” on the team.  However, even with some...

One of the hard fast rules of friendship is never dating the same person as your friend. Everyone knows that the outcome only brings heart break for everyone involved.  There is another rule that is slightly less known and unfortunately I learned the hard way.  That rule is not to apply for the same job as your friend.  I didn’t even realize my best friend was looking for jobs when I started my interview process. I couldn’t wait to tell her that I got an interview with an awesome company. Turns out she had an interview with the same company! How amazing, they had two openings and it was perfect, we could work together again. We studied and shared our tips and ideas with each other. It was both bonding and competitive at the same time, which brought up some strange feelings for us both.  We didn’t entertain any negative outcomes, only the possibility of being able to work with each other again.  Alas the interviews were extremely hard and we both bombed them,...

If only confidence was bottled or in pill form, life would be so easy. After all, most of the criteria for which we strive in order to have "successful life" are all tied to confidence.  Landing a job, starting a business,  changing careers, asking for a raise,  you name it and I guarantee the steps you need to take towards your goals are backed by confidence. You need the confidence to put yourself out there, get knocked out, kicked while you're down, gut punched and after all of that pick your bloody bruised ego up and do it all over again. Confidence is something that has never come naturally to me. The tactic that I have used the most in my life to break through the fear of not being smart/educated/talented/well-spoken/good enough is . . .  "Fake It Until You Make It".   The idea of acting as if you are confident, smart or whatever other feelings you need in your given situation.  The science behind 'acting as if' is that if you fake it long...

In the past 8 years of my career I have learned so many critical life lessons.  It has been a long journey... both as a woman in tech and a self taught Developer.  I came up with a list of things for you that I wish someone had told me at the start of my journey. You are smarter than you think you are. Coding is hard and there is always tons to learn. Don’t be afraid to ask questions , it is always better to ask than waste time being stuck. Write your questions down before presenting them so you can articulate yourself better. Pull requests can be brutal! Do your best to put your feelings aside. Treat pull requests as an opportunity to learn .  Constructive criticism will do so much for your career .  If you are having a hard time with it, remember . . . just because you have to change your code doesn’t mean that you did it wrong - you just did it a different way ( after all working code is good code - there are just more effect or clean ways to do ever...