Nicole's January blogs, RSA attack, Heart language
Hello and happy Friday! This month I kept busy with blog posts and finished up one of my projects, implementing the Bleichenbacher attack on RSA. I also poked around at my next language, Heart.
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Now onto the updates for this month!
Blog updates
Here are the posts from this month. If you like them, please share them (or this email)!
- TIL: enabling features on transitive dependencies (Rust): Just a short one on something I learned!
- Are any of your features the steak on the menu?: Inspired by a conversation at work, I take the position that we shouldn't neglect features in our products. They should be present and good, or not there at all, most of the time.
- RSA is deceptively simple (and fun): A little dive into how RSA works! It's a very neat cryptosystem (which we shouldn't use). A companion to this post, explaining the Bleichenbacher attack, will come out in February.
- I'm scared, and hopeful, and you can help: This one is deeply personal. It talks about why I'm afraid right now, but why I'm still hopeful, and gives actionable suggestions for how to help your trans colleagues, friends, and family.
- The most important goal in designing software is understandability: Making code understandable is more important than anything else as a first goal, and here is why. Yes, it trumps security and performance for the primary goal.
- Automating my backups with restic and anacron: Okay, so I backup my laptop often, but it wasn't automated until now! Automating it was a little tricky in spots, so I wrote it up as a post.
Side projects
Besides my blog writing, here's what I've been up to.
Explorations in cryptography are coming to a close (for now)! I finished an implementation of the Bleichenbacher attack, which I'll write up in February. (I might try some other formats for visualizing it and presenting it, too!) This was very rewarding and a lot of work. After I write the post I'm taking a break from cryptography to get some other projects done, but then I want to come back around to some other cryptosystems, like Diffie-Hellman.
My new language, Heart, has progressed in its initial design! In the repo I have more explicit design goals and initial sketches of some syntax I'm trying out. Among the features I'm excited for, it will have very easy concurrency baked in and there will be performance/profiling tooling built into the runtime. This month I'm mostly focused here on getting the syntax locked in to be able to explore initial tooling.
My research on documentation in software engineering is chugging along in the background. The blog book project is just about ready for a first test print! And I'm starting on a lot of little code projects to just play for a bit and rebuild some energy reserves.
That's all for this month! Thanks again for reading and subscribing. I hope January was kind to you and that February is everything you hope it to be.
-Nicole