Tech on Bill Glover

Thunderbird & PGP

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:07:00 +0000

At some point (2020) Thunderbird stopped using Enigmail. Native support for GPG doesn’t (easily) allow you to use sub-keys stored on a Yubikey for signing or encryption. It is possible to tell Thunderbird to use one external key but this doesn’t work if you have separate sub-keys for both message signing and encryption.

This guide shows how to create and export a temporary key containing both the signing and encryption keys for use in Thunderbird.

Tech Talk: Caching

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:03:56 +0000

I gave a talk titled, Caching, Data Grids and More. The talk was targetted at Platform Engineers who were aware of caching solutions, supported them, but with little experience of having used them in application development. It was a fun talk to give.

Foundational Skills

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:54:20 +0100

In his recent newsletter titled Two Wonderful Investments In Your Programming Career, Rob Conery talks about learning the “foundational” skills of the industry. This got me thinking; what would I include on my list of foundational skills?

In his newsletter, Rob lists five foundational technologies but calls out two in particular that stand out to him:

Your Editor
SQL

I’d agree on both counts. Pick a text editor and learn it well. It doesn’t matter if you don’t pick the most popular, or the one your colleagues use. Pick one you like and invest time in learning how to use it.

Setting the PATH variable on macOS with ZSH

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 20:30:00 +0000

The behaviour of the PATH variable in ZSH on macOS can be confusing. If you follow ZSH guidance, you should set your PATH variable in ~/.zshenv.

“ .zshenv is sourced on all invocations of the shell, unless the -f option is set. It should contain commands to set the command search path, plus other important environment variables. .zshenv should not contain commands that produce output or assume the shell is attached to a tty.”

Live Traffic Light Timing

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0700

Assumed Audience: anyone with an interest in delightful technology or technical estimation

On a trip to Beijing, I saw navigation apps included real-time traffic light updates. They show the live countdown to a change in the lights. An audible prompt lets you know of an impending change. This is particularly useful when some sequences involve wait times over 99s. I’d not seen this before, but seeing it in action was one of those rare delightful moments with technology.