Update: Yeah… Jekyll was great and I had a lot of fun with it, but I’ve since moved off it to Medium. There’s lots of cool stuff you can do with Jekyll, but in the end the need to develop posts with a text editor and a Ruby environment lost out to a convenient iOS app. So it’s been more days than I’d like since my last blog, sadly since I’ve been dealing with some discomfort in my arms along the lines of an RSI, something I plan on discussing more....

I’ve been lucky enough to play in a number of computer attack & defend (sometimes only one or the other) Capture The Flags. They’ve been some of the best learning experiences I’ve ever had and a ton of fun. It really compresses all of cyber security, minus that boring policy stuff, into a smaller time frame. Even with all the benefits there is one tough part: you can’t always spend a weekend in a friends basement with a pallet of Redbull or on the floor at DefCon CTF....

In an effort to improve my “Unix” skills I’m trying to do more and more on the command line, such as writing this blog. This has worked out for me in a lot of ways, making much of my work faster, less environment dependent, and easier to reproduce/script. I’ve learned lots of tricks to help with this, but recently came across one of the best ones: Aspell. First a confession: people get into the computer industry for lots of reasons....

So working at GitHub it is no surprise I believe in and use a lot of open source software. I think especially for security this makes sense, for a number of reasons: We need tools we can trust, so transparency is key We need tools we can modify, since we often need things that don’t exist We need tools that are cross platform And the list goes on. I try to support these projects, with code, with feedback, with use, and sometimes, with praise....

I’m a big believer in mentoring. Classes are great, self learning is hugely important, but there are few things that help someone grow as much as having someone a little bit farther down the road to give a little bit of guidance. I’ve been lucky enough throughout my life to have had many mentors in a number of aspects of my career and life. These people have been invaluable. I’m not the only one....

So as initially suggested I haven’t been good about blogging yet. I’ve been quite busy with work. But I did want to pass along one small tip I’ve picked up. A lot of the work I’ve been doing has been a combination of Ruby/Python and command line data parsing. In much of this shell I’m working through JSON documents on the command line, often using commands like: _$ cat foo.txt | grep “foo” | sort | uniq_ I’ve learned a lot about composing commands and the beauty of the Unix philosophy, it’s been great....

So after a lot of harassment by the likes of Ben Balter and some other GitHubber’s I’ve decided it’s a good time to learn Jekyll and GitHub Pages, along with the wonderful Hyde library for style points, and start a blog. I’ve largely been terrible about blogging, but frankly I think I’ve never had quite such a good handle on what interests me and how to talk about it, so here’s hoping this one goes better....