Introducing Kenny

Kenny is my tool for webmasters who run sites secured with HTTP basic authentication. Kenny can track down and show these folks where logins for their site(s) have been leaked on the public Web.

Ride into the danger zone, y'all. - Kenny L.

I envisaged Kenny as a project in which I could explore several technologies:

• ASP.NET MVC 4
• Bootstrap
• Entity Framework migrations
• GitHub and the current state of Git on Windows
• AppHarbor

And that's exactly what I did: Kenny is now a real thing, and all these technologies were crucial in its construction.

Webmasters can add the sites they want to track.

Kenny will search the public Web for logins and collect them in a list where the webmaster can test them for validity and review the source of each leak.

I had a ball working on Kenny, and I learned a lot about some technologies I’d been itching to work with. I plan to follow up this blog post with another that goes into some details about the different tech I used, what I learned, and what was cool about them.

In the meantime, check out the source code and play with the demo on AppHarbor:

• Kenny on GitHub
• Kenny on AppHarbor

The Boy Scout Rule

One of the software development principles I live by is the "Boy Scout Rule".

The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession.

Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.

If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.

Whenever I dig around in my company's rather large codebase hunting down a bug or perhaps adding a feature, I look for little opportunities to leave the files I touch a little cleaner than I found them. Ancient commented-out sections of code, unused variables, unused methods, and other detritus left behind by the organic change of a codebase are all ripe targets. ReSharper is the poker stick with which I pick up the litter around my campsite.

It's my little way of fighting back against the tendency of a codebase to decay and become noisy over time. And, not to mention, there's just something fun about deleting code. I encourage everyone to experience the joy of deletion.