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Writing is Dead and Meetings are Killing It

Writing is dying the death-by-zoom.

politics

The Tightening Belt

The popping of the tech bubble is a good thing, actually

dev

Software prefiguration

Software prefiguration is a high-potential, relatively low-risk route to a liberated society.

grabbrapp

Chicken, egg, data model

What comes first, `chicken_id`, `egg_id` or `makechicken()`?

A builder's approach to content creation

I did some introspection recently and came to the conclusion that I've been going about most things wrong, despite finding what some might call success in a lot of my ventures. I've been a... content consumer? for quite some time now. I was watching YouTube pretty early on in the

Rust Snippets #0 - The Windows Function

This is the first in an ongoing log of easy/simple/esoteric methods, functions and patterns in Rust that will (hopefully) make your life easier. I'm writing it in parallel to a similar series in Python, the first post of which you can find here. This article is all about

Project-Oriented Learning, or How to Learn Anything

I've talked about it before that one of the things that drew me to computer science versus physics, chemistry, biology or any of the other popular sciences is the opportunity for fast, iterative and virtually free (often actually free) experimentation. Chemistry often requires an expensive lab and tons of safety

Learning Rust - Rust Book Chapters 1-3

I've been writing Rust for a couple of months now but noticed I was quickly starting to run into a lack of knowledge on some foundational topics that was leading to frustrating bugs and annoying dead ends. So, instead of trying to forge ahead in the hopes that I could

Python Snippets #0 - Array Slicing

This is the first of an ongoing and probably infrequent series on Python snippets, or short, basic hints for Python to make your developer life easier. This one is incredibly basic: array slicing! Array slicing, or the syntax to create sub-arrays from input arrays, is an incredibly useful concept that

Road to OSCP 0x0 - Starting the Road to the PNPT

This is the year that I'm finally going to conquer the OSCP. I've talked about my plan for studying for the OSCP in a YouTube video, but I'll rehash it a bit here on the blog as well. The plan is to study up for the PNPT, or the Practical

Learning Rust - Lifetimes and Scope

I've been livestreaming malware development in Rust several times per week over the last two weeks over on YouTube and Twitch. There was a bit of consternation about me switching over to Rust early on: a lot of people really wanted to see me stick it out with C/C+

How Malware Works

I had a question on one of my posts on YouTube that made me realize that some people may not be super familiar with some of the terminology surrounding malware development and reverse engineering. This isn't meant as a shame on the OP, moreso a failure on my part (and

How to develop good malware (and software in general)

I'm going to preface this article with stating what is obvious by anyone who has watched my videos or livestreams on YouTube: I'm not a good malware developer. I'm trying, and I've gotten better, but anyone who has watched my content or read my blogs on the subject knows it's

Malware Dev Environment 1 - Learning Makefiles

In my most recent iteration of my Reverse-Reverse Engineering series, I decided to ditch the VisualStudio set up and go with a more traditional C/C++ development set up. This is both because I didn't want to become super dependent on the MSFT stack and because I wanted to learn

Why I'm moving to the Fediverse

(TL;DR - I'm not leaving Twitter, but I'll be on it less. You can find me here: valhalla_dev@kolektiva.social ) Last night was an interesting night. Last night, Elon Musk completed the purchase of Twitter. As someone who has researched radicalism and extremism in online spaces, I've been

Building a Full-Stack Web Scraping Dashboard with Python and React

Scraping projects are a great way to flex your full-stack web development muscles. This article is going to run you through a quick example of how you can build out a simple scraping dashboard. Those of you who are either subscribed to my Ghost blogs, follow me on Twitter or

Organizing a React Web Application

— This story was originally written here on my blog. If you enjoy my research, you can subscribe to me on Ghost or Substack and follow me on Twitter — One of the things that’s irritated me as of late is how little attention is paid to how to properly organize

An Introduction to FastAPI

I’ve been a Flask developer for a good chunk of time now. I like Flask; it’s fast enough, easy enough to understand and kinda just does what you need it to do. FastAPI came across my radar a couple weeks ago, though, and after trying it out, I

Benchmarking Python’s FastAPI framework versus Flask

I’ve started working with FastAPI to build Python-based backends. Both by name and by reputation, I hear FastAPI is pretty… fast. I also like a lot of the syntax for creating API’s with FastAPI versus Flask, but I was curious if I could get down to a solid

Source?

The complexities of citing and publishing your source (code)

A Career Finally in (Successful) Transition

I've been relatively quiet on social media, my blog, my newsletter and most everywhere else. This is at least in part because I've been finishing off the final bits of a years-long career transition. To really understand how and why this transition came about, I need to explain how my

The VirusTotal API - Malware Automation at Scale

If you've spent much time at all in information security, you've probably had to deal with VirusTotal for some function or another, whether it's searching for malware on the platform or uploading the malware you built to test whether or not it is detected by various antivirus programs. If you

Software Development’s Business Factors

Software development is, primarily and in most cases, a business function. You are either developing applications that will directly serve as a revenue-generating product (web applications, mobile apps, e-commerce, etc.), a lead-generating marketing product (landing pages, advertising platforms, etc.) or a logistic supporting product (something that makes the running of

Why Does Your Startup Need a Data Collection Plan?

I don’t think I need to tell my average reader that businesses need to make data-informed decisions. What might surprise you, though, is that you as an entrepreneur, business owner, startup founder or executive have all the data you need at the tip of your fingers. What you don’

You Don’t Need That Data

‍ I’m going to do something a bit strange, for someone who has sort of made “data collection” his brand. I’m going to tell you that you probably don’t need the data you think you do. In information security, the industry I’ve called my home for the