As far as the internet knows, there are exactly 3 people on the globe named Dino Chiesa. One is a guy who lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is into real-estate. Another is a retired Italian race driver, who now owns a karting team. I’m not either of those. I’m the third guy.
This blog is a sporadic outlet for me. I’ll write about software things, industry things, management, strategy, communications, marketing, and that sort of thing. Probably not much about Canadian real-estate or karting.
View my CV. (gets updated lazily)
About The Blog
The blog runs on WordPress, which is an open-source PHP-based blog system. For the theme, a few years back I started with smartone, and modified it a little, to make it work better for me. I cleaned up the display, removed the mural pictures. I added in some social media buttons, so you can share posts on Google+ or Facebook or Reddit or Twitter with a quick click.
That required just a little bit of PHP tweaking and some Javascript magic.
I’m no designer, so the whole blog is still pretty basic.
I also added in a few extra options in the list of subscription options shown in the upper right corner of each page; these let readers connect with me via Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn or Stackoverflow. And I added a couple of new widgets to the sidebar. One shows Google+ activity; I’ve described that last part here. Another is a skydrive hotlink plugin, which I use to allow you to directly download my CV. I made a few others as well. You can find all the plugins I’ve publicly released on wordpress.org. PHP is pretty handy, and it doesn’t deserve the disparagement it receives from some quarters. JavaScript is just as goofy as a language.
But even after all those customizations, the site didn’t look good on a mobile phone. And it was growing kind of stale for me. So I moved to the Gateway theme from rescuethemes. I lost a bit of the customization I did with the buttons and so on, but all of the plugins still work. Which is nice.
The blog is hosted on nearlyfreespeech.net. For those of you on a budget, with a low-volume blog like this, I recommend nearlyfreespeech.net. It’s NOT free, but it’s pretty cheap. Just register your domain (about $10 a year) and park it on the free service, install wordpress, and you’ve got yourself a low-cost blogging system. MySql, FTP, SSH access, and so on. A good deal. Recommended. I originally was on 000webhost, but the service there was not very good, especially the network performance. In June 2014, I moved the WordPress blog to NFS.
In January 2016, I used LetsEncrypt to get a site certificate and deploy it to my NearlyFreeSpeech-hosted site. This was pretty easy. No extra cost.
About The Author
I figure in some ways this blog acts as my digital CV. Aside from the content and structure of the posts I’ve written over the years, you can look at the JS code to see what I did with the frontends; you can see the plugins I’ve written for WordPress; and you can find my Stackoverflow participation. What you won’t see is much of my professional work – the stuff that keeps me busy most of my work week. This blog is a spare-time endeavor. If you have any questions, let me know by contacting me with the links in the upper-right corner.
Tobias Jamin 2016-September-5
Hello Dino,
are you the one who developed DotNetZip many years ago?
https://github.com/haf/DotNetZip.Semverd/issues/28
Greetings from Germany,
Tobias
dpc 2016-September-17
Yesiam. I know of three people named “Dino Chiesa”. One is a race car driver. One is a Toronto-based real estate guy. and the other, the software guy, is me. Whatsup, Tobias ?
Rene Verhage 2022-May-10
Hi Dino, then I (also) have a question for you: what’s the origin of the file EditCsproj.exe that is included as part of the sources?
Reason for asking is, that the virus scanner on my company laptop blocks this executable as suspicious. My IT department is a bit hesitant in putting it on the whitelist, as it is not signed. So they were asking me if I could provide more info on it, e.g. who developed it. But unfortunately I can’t derive that from the code. So I was hoping that you remember.
Shrimoyee Chaki 2022-November-14
Hello,
I hope you are doing fine.. I am currently working on developing nodejs scripts so that we can deploy proxy programmatically in apigee hybrid. I was using the get-gcp-access-token from your repo to generate access token (Thankyou so much for this!) but here since the access token comes in encoded format I am not able to read and export it and use it later on to deploy proxy. Is there any way I can go around it. Since I am new to node js.
dpc 2023-April-7
hi, I’m sorry about the delay in responding. I had missed this question. In case this is still an outstanding question, or in case someone else comes here with the same question, I’ll answer now.
You wrote: but here since the access token comes in encoded format I am not able to read and export it and use it later on to deploy proxy. Is there any way I can go around it.
I think this is not correct. The access token is in a BEARER format. You need only to pass that token as a Bearer token in the Authorization header, as per the OAuth standard. You don’t need to read or interpret the token. It’s opaque to you. Just a string of characters.
Good luck