1---
 2template:
 3title: 2019 in review
 4subtitle: A look back at last year
 5date: 2020-01-02
 6---
 7
 8Just landed in a rainy Chennai, back in campus for my 6th semester.
 9A little late to the "year in review blog post" party; travel took up
10most of my time. Last year was pretty eventful (at least in my books),
11and I think I did a bunch of cool stuff---let's see!
12
13## Interning at SecureLayer7
14
15Last summer, I interned at [SecureLayer7](https://securelayer7.net),
16a security consulting firm in Pune, India. My work was mostly in
17hardware and embededded security research. I learnt a ton about ARM and
18MIPS reversing and exploitation, UART and JTAG, firmware RE and
19enterprise IoT security.
20
21I also earned my first CVE! I've written about it in detail
22[here](/blog/fb50).
23
24## Conferences
25
26I attended two major conferences last year---Nullcon Goa and PyCon
27India. Both super fun experiences and I met a ton of cool people!
28[Nullcon Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/icyphox/status/1101022604851212288)
29and [PyCon blog post](/blog/pycon-wrap-up).
30
31## Talks
32
33I gave two talks last year:
34
351. *Intro to Reverse Engineering* at Cyware 2019
362. *"Smart lock? Nah dude."* at PyCon India
37
38## Things I made
39
40Not in order, because I CBA:
41
42- [repl](https://github.com/icyphox/repl): More of a quick bash hack, 
43  I don't really use it.
44- [pw](https://github.com/icyphox/pw): A password manager. This,
45  I actually do use. I've even written a tiny 
46  [`dmenu` wrapper](https://github.com/icyphox/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/pwmenu.sh)
47  for it. 
48- [twsh](https://github.com/icyphox/twsh): An incomplete twtxt client,
49  in bash. I have yet to get around to finishing it.
50- [alpine ports](https://github.com/icyphox/alpine): My APKBUILDs for
51  Alpine.
52- [detotated](https://github.com/icyphox/detotated): An IRC bot written
53  in Python. See [IRC for DMs](/blog/irc-for-dms).
54- [icyrc](https://github.com/icyphox/icyrc): A no bullshit IRC client,
55  because WeeChat is bloat.
56
57I probably missed something, but whatever.
58
59## Blog posts
60
61```
62$ ls -1 pages/blog/*.md | wc -l
6320
64```
65
66So excluding today's post, and `_index.md`, that's 18 posts! I had
67initially planned to write one post a month, but hey, this is great. My
68plan for 2020 is to write one post a _week_---unrealistic, I know, but
69I will try nevertheless.
70
71I wrote about a bunch of things, ranging from programming to
72return-oriented-programming (heh), sysadmin and security stuff, and
73a hint of culture and philosophy. Nice!
74
75The [Python for Reverse Engineering](/blog/python-for-re-1) post got
76a ton of attention on the interwebz, so that was cool.
77
78## Bye 2019
79
802019 was super productive! (in my terms). I learnt a lot of new things
81last year, and I can only hope to learn as much in 2020. :)
82
83I'll see you next week.