Nicole's February blogs and a cool cryptography demo
Hello and happy Friday! This month I had my usual blogging, and had a few other exciting things happen—a podcast appearance and wrapping up a demo I've been working on for a while.
Blog updates
Here are the posts from this month:
- "Help, I see a problem and no one is prioritizing it!": A mentee recently brought me a problem she was running into at work, and it's a problem I've seen many people run into (including myself), so I wrote up an approach to it.
- Go slow to go fast: It's tempting to dive into things to try the end goal right away, but if we want to be better software engineers, we have to stretch ourselves slowly, instead of all at once.
- Great management and leadership books for the technical track: Even with the recent books about staff+ engineering, there are far fewer books for technical track leaders than for management track. But management track books are great for technical leadership, too! Here are some of the ones I recommend.
- Too much of a good thing: the trade-off we make with tests: As engineers, we often push for more tests and assume more tests = more better. But that ignores the tradeoff we make when we do write tests. Besides, why do we even write tests to begin with?
Side projects
One of my blog posts from this month was noticed by the host of Python Test, and we setup a recording! The episode I'm on should be out in March. It was a really fun conversation.
I also finished up the demo of the Bleichenbacher '98 attack on RSA (the "million messages attack"). This took me a while, because I had to fix bugs in my previous implementation of this, convert the attack code into an iterator, and implement a whole frontend demo of it! The entire thing runs in your browser because I compiled it to WASM. I'll write up a blog post on how I did this in March, but the demo is super cool and you can find it on its demo page.
No major updates for the other projects I have in flight!
That's all for this month. Thank you for reading and subscribing. I hope you have a great month!
-Nicole