02 January, 2020

2019 in review

A look back at last year

   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 [1]SecureLayer7, 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 [2]here.

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!
   [3]Nullcon Twitter thread and [4]PyCon blog post.

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:
     * [5]repl: More of a quick bash hack, I don't really use it.
     * [6]pw: A password manager. This, I actually do use. I've even
       written a tiny [7]dmenu wrapper for it.
     * [8]twsh: An incomplete twtxt client, in bash. I have yet to get
       around to finishing it.
     * [9]alpine ports: My APKBUILDs for Alpine.
     * [10]detotated: An IRC bot written in Python. See [11]IRC for DMs.
     * [12]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 [13]Python for Reverse Engineering 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.

References

   1. https://securelayer7.net/
   2. https://icyphox.sh/blog/fb50
   3. https://twitter.com/icyphox/status/1101022604851212288
   4. https://icyphox.sh/blog/pycon-wrap-up
   5. https://github.com/icyphox/repl
   6. https://github.com/icyphox/pw
   7. https://github.com/icyphox/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/pwmenu.sh
   8. https://github.com/icyphox/twsh
   9. https://github.com/icyphox/alpine
  10. https://github.com/icyphox/detotated
  11. https://icyphox.sh/blog/irc-for-dms
  12. https://github.com/icyphox/icyrc
  13. https://icyphox.sh/blog/python-for-re-1