02 Jan, 2020

2019 in review

A look back at last year

Just landed in a rainy Chennai, back in campus for my 6th semester. A little late to the “year in review blog post” party; travel took up most of my time. Last year was pretty eventful (at least in my books), and I think I did a bunch of cool stuff—let’s see!

Interning at SecureLayer7

Last summer, I interned at SecureLayer7, a security consulting firm in Pune, India. My work was mostly in hardware and embededded security research. I learnt a ton about ARM and MIPS reversing and exploitation, UART and JTAG, firmware RE and enterprise IoT security.

I also earned my first CVE! I’ve written about it in detail here.

Conferences

I attended two major conferences last year—Nullcon Goa and PyCon India. Both super fun experiences and I met a ton of cool people! Nullcon Twitter thread and PyCon blog post.

Talks

I gave two talks last year:

Intro to Reverse Engineering at Cyware 2019
“Smart lock? Nah dude.” at PyCon India

Things I made

Not in order, because I CBA:

repl: More of a quick bash hack, I don’t really use it.
pw: A password manager. This, I actually do use. I’ve even written a tiny dmenu wrapper for it.
twsh: An incomplete twtxt client, in bash. I have yet to get around to finishing it.
alpine ports: My APKBUILDs for Alpine.
detotated: An IRC bot written in Python. See IRC for DMs.
icyrc: A no bullshit IRC client, because WeeChat is bloat.

I probably missed something, but whatever.

Blog posts

$ ls -1 pages/blog/*.md | wc -l
20

So excluding today’s post, and _index.md, that’s 18 posts! I had initially planned to write one post a month, but hey, this is great. My plan for 2020 is to write one post a week—unrealistic, I know, but I will try nevertheless.

I wrote about a bunch of things, ranging from programming to return-oriented-programming (heh), sysadmin and security stuff, and a hint of culture and philosophy. Nice!

The Python for Reverse Engineering post got a ton of attention on the interwebz, so that was cool.

Bye 2019

2019 was super productive! (in my terms). I learnt a lot of new things last year, and I can only hope to learn as much in 2020. :)

I’ll see you next week.

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