---
date: '2020-01-02'
subtitle: A look back at last year
title: 2019 in review
url: '2019-in-review'
---

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](https://securelayer7.net), 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](/blog/fb50).

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](https://twitter.com/icyphox/status/1101022604851212288) and
[PyCon blog post](/blog/pycon-wrap-up).

Talks
-----

I gave two talks last year:

1.  *Intro to Reverse Engineering* at Cyware 2019
2.  *"Smart lock? Nah dude."* at PyCon India

Things I made
-------------

Not in order, because I CBA:

-   [repl](https://github.com/icyphox/repl): More of a quick bash hack,
    I don't really use it.
-   [pw](https://github.com/icyphox/pw): A password manager. This, I
    actually do use. I've even written a tiny [`dmenu`
    wrapper](https://github.com/icyphox/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/pwmenu.sh)
    for it.
-   [twsh](https://github.com/icyphox/twsh): An incomplete twtxt client,
    in bash. I have yet to get around to finishing it.
-   [alpine ports](https://github.com/icyphox/alpine): My APKBUILDs for
    Alpine.
-   [detotated](https://github.com/icyphox/detotated): An IRC bot
    written in Python. See [IRC for DMs](/blog/irc-for-dms).
-   [icyrc](https://github.com/icyphox/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](/blog/python-for-re-1) 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.