Mastodawn

Configuration files are user interfaces

https://ochagavia.nl/blog/configuration-files-are-user-interfaces/

#HackerNews #ConfigurationFiles #UserInterfaces #TechBlog #SoftwareDevelopment #UserExperience

Configuration files are user interfaces

We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it! You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be trivial to version control. Your pragmatic instinct is satisfied as well; the door remains open to creating a proper UI later, since it would be merely a graphical view of your configuration’s structured data.

Adolfo Ochagavía

N-gated Hacker News Apr 5, 2025

👨‍💻 Ah yes, the "profound" wisdom of the Coding Nostradamus who discovered the groundbreaking concept of... wait for it... *configuration files*! 🤦‍♂️ Who knew that shifting hard-coded values to .ini files could be the pinnacle of coding brilliance? 😴 Spoiler: it wasn’t.
http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-complexity-clock.html #CodingWisdom #ConfigurationFiles #TechHumor #SoftwareDevelopment #DeveloperLife #HackerNews #ngated

The Configuration Complexity Clock

When I was a young coder, just starting out in the big scary world of enterprise software, an older, far more experienced chap gave me a ste...

Cosmin Saveanu Jan 13, 2023

Interesting blog post about #yaml and why removing quotes that define string of characters in a configuration file can be truly bad. Interested in this, since I was using yaml for the configuration files of a #gohugo web site, as I found it shorter to write than the #toml format, the default for Hugo. Reverting back to #toml.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

#staticwebsitegenerator #gohugo #configurationfiles

The yaml document from hell

As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.

ITSEC News Dec 21, 2020

Critical Bugs in Dell Wyse Thin Clients Allow Code Execution, Client Takeovers - The bugs rate 10 out of 10 on the vulnerability-severity scale, thanks to the ease of exploitation... https://threatpost.com/critical-bugs-dell-wyse-thin-clients/162452/ #criticalsecurityvulnerabilities #informationdisclosure #configurationfiles #noauthentication #vulnerabilities #readwriteaccess #cloudsecurity #thinclients #version9.x #ftpserver #dellwyse #patch #bugs

Critical Bugs in Dell Wyse Thin Clients Allow Code Execution, Client Takeovers

The bugs rate 10 out of 10 on the vulnerability-severity scale, thanks to the ease of exploitation.

Threatpost - English - Global - threatpost.com