I recently had to switch phones, because my old phone conked out. I had an app on that phone that I used for short-lived MFA codes for various logins I use. That app was a poor choice, because it didn’t allow for a backup of the secrets used for the code generation, so I had to go to the relevant logins and one by one remove MFA, then add it again. While doing so, I was wondering how this stuff works underneath, so I started looking into this.

I’ve wanted to get rid of Wordpress for a while now. It’s more of a hassle than anything else, really. And who on earth still uses PHP? Anyway, a while ago I embarked on the journey to find a good replacement. First, I looked at other CMS systems that are similar to Wordpress, but soon realized that they’d all require me to keep them up-to-date all the time, and they’d likely be just about as annoying. At the same time, I’ve gotten so used to creating web content using markdown, that I hoped I could find something where markdown indeed plays a significant role in building the content. In addition, being a developer at heart, I was hoping to also find something with a decent version control system for history and rollbacks (whenever necessary) and the likes.

Earlier this year we were dealing with an issue in one of our data processing pipelines. Through telemetry we could see where the problem was coming from, but I did wonder if I could model the problem in a simulation too. After all, if we have a tool available to predict certain issues before we implement them, that can be very helpful to adapt the design and/or code upfront. I remembered some lecture from university many years ago, where we were discussing discrete event simulations. So I figured I’d give it a shot and see if I can write a simple simulator for such a producer/consumer scenario with TypeScript.