1---
 2date: '2020-01-02'
 3subtitle: A look back at last year
 4title: 2019 in review
 5url: '2019-in-review'
 6---
 7
 8Just landed in a rainy Chennai, back in campus for my 6th semester. A
 9little late to the "year in review blog post" party; travel took up most
10of my time. Last year was pretty eventful (at least in my books), and I
11think I did a bunch of cool stuff---let's see!
12
13Interning at SecureLayer7
14-------------------------
15
16Last summer, I interned at [SecureLayer7](https://securelayer7.net), a
17security consulting firm in Pune, India. My work was mostly in hardware
18and embededded security research. I learnt a ton about ARM and MIPS
19reversing and exploitation, UART and JTAG, firmware RE and enterprise
20IoT security.
21
22I also earned my first CVE! I've written about it in detail
23[here](/blog/fb50).
24
25Conferences
26-----------
27
28I attended two major conferences last year---Nullcon Goa and PyCon
29India. Both super fun experiences and I met a ton of cool people!
30[Nullcon Twitter
31thread](https://twitter.com/icyphox/status/1101022604851212288) and
32[PyCon blog post](/blog/pycon-wrap-up).
33
34Talks
35-----
36
37I gave two talks last year:
38
391.  *Intro to Reverse Engineering* at Cyware 2019
402.  *"Smart lock? Nah dude."* at PyCon India
41
42Things I made
43-------------
44
45Not in order, because I CBA:
46
47-   [repl](https://github.com/icyphox/repl): More of a quick bash hack,
48    I don't really use it.
49-   [pw](https://github.com/icyphox/pw): A password manager. This, I
50    actually do use. I've even written a tiny [`dmenu`
51    wrapper](https://github.com/icyphox/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/pwmenu.sh)
52    for it.
53-   [twsh](https://github.com/icyphox/twsh): An incomplete twtxt client,
54    in bash. I have yet to get around to finishing it.
55-   [alpine ports](https://github.com/icyphox/alpine): My APKBUILDs for
56    Alpine.
57-   [detotated](https://github.com/icyphox/detotated): An IRC bot
58    written in Python. See [IRC for DMs](/blog/irc-for-dms).
59-   [icyrc](https://github.com/icyphox/icyrc): A no bullshit IRC client,
60    because WeeChat is bloat.
61
62I probably missed something, but whatever.
63
64Blog posts
65----------
66
67    $ ls -1 pages/blog/*.md | wc -l
68    20
69
70So excluding today's post, and `_index.md`, that's 18 posts! I had
71initially planned to write one post a month, but hey, this is great. My
72plan for 2020 is to write one post a *week*---unrealistic, I know, but I
73will try nevertheless.
74
75I wrote about a bunch of things, ranging from programming to
76return-oriented-programming (heh), sysadmin and security stuff, and a
77hint of culture and philosophy. Nice!
78
79The [Python for Reverse Engineering](/blog/python-for-re-1) post got a
80ton of attention on the interwebz, so that was cool.
81
82Bye 2019
83--------
84
852019 was super productive! (in my terms). I learnt a lot of new things
86last year, and I can only hope to learn as much in 2020. :)
87
88I'll see you next week.