Hello from the other side

If you read this post today you might have noticed there was a huge break since the last post. More than 4 years ago I was actively blogging about security (mostly offensive stuff) and appsec.

So what happened since then? Well not only in private some things have changed but also professionally I kind of switched sides. While being involved in pentests for a while I decided to become more blue-team oriented and help others to build secure products. Software engineering combined with security is what still keeps me busy and also motivated.

Golang

After my sabbatical from 2017 - 2018 I thought it might be the perfect time to learn a new programming language. After flirting for a while with Golang I’ve ordered The Go Programming language which still has been a very good introduction and many times used as a reference. And of course I was finally introduced to the world of cloud computing, especially to AWS.

Serverless

During this journey I also realized how much potential FaaS has and I also started working on some private project which used Golang, Serverless and DynamoDB for storing TiddlyWiki tiddlers in a more fancy way. The project is called widdly and is a fork of opennota/widdly and has serverless and dynamodb support for Tiddlywiki. A demo is also available.

Recently I’ve been using TiddlyWiki to build a Zettelkasten, similar to roam. You can find it at brainfck.org.

Migrate from Pelican

Before resurrecting this blog, I had to migrate all my markdown content, all my jupyter notebooks from Pelican to hugo. The pelican engine did its job but it was way to slow compared to hugo and after all I wanted to try something new.

Converting jupyter notebooks was an easy task thanks to PelicanToHugo. With the magic of GitHub Actions I am now able to separate blog content from generated HTML content and automatically deploy this blog to GitHub pages whenever content is pushed to the repository.

What’s missing? Actually a lot:

• pictures (from old dl.dornea.nu)
  • This time I would put them into each posts folder like I did here.
• since there is no graphviz module/plugin for hugo I need a new solution
  • there is gravizo but this is 3rd-party service which might not be available in a couple of years
  • I could parse all the graphviz code, run the graphviz CLI, generate the picture and adapt the markdown file (probably the preferred solution)
• add more shortcodes
  • e.g. for showing notices

BTW: Read here why blogging is hard. With this in mind: Nice to see you again :)�