1---
 2template:
 3title: 2019 in review
 4subtitle: A look back at last year
 5date: 2020-01-02
 6slug: 2019-in-review
 7---
 8
 9Just landed in a rainy Chennai, back in campus for my 6th semester.
10A little late to the "year in review blog post" party; travel took up
11most of my time. Last year was pretty eventful (at least in my books),
12and I think I did a bunch of cool stuff -- let's see!
13
14## Interning at SecureLayer7
15
16Last summer, I interned at [SecureLayer7](https://securelayer7.net),
17a security consulting firm in Pune, India. My work was mostly in
18hardware and embededded security research. I learnt a ton about ARM and
19MIPS reversing and exploitation, UART and JTAG, firmware RE and
20enterprise IoT security.
21
22I also earned my first CVE! I've written about it in detail
23[here](/blog/fb50).
24
25## Conferences
26
27I attended two major conferences last year -- Nullcon Goa and PyCon
28India. Both super fun experiences and I met a ton of cool people!
29[Nullcon Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/icyphox/status/1101022604851212288)
30and [PyCon blog post](/blog/pycon-wrap-up).
31
32## Talks
33
34I gave two talks last year:
35
361. *Intro to Reverse Engineering* at Cyware 2019
372. *"Smart lock? Nah dude."* at PyCon India
38
39## Things I made
40
41Not in order, because I CBA:
42
43- [repl](https://github.com/icyphox/repl): More of a quick bash hack, 
44  I don't really use it.
45- [pw](https://github.com/icyphox/pw): A password manager. This,
46  I actually do use. I've even written a tiny 
47  [`dmenu` wrapper](https://github.com/icyphox/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/pwmenu.sh)
48  for it. 
49- [twsh](https://github.com/icyphox/twsh): An incomplete twtxt client,
50  in bash. I have yet to get around to finishing it.
51- [alpine ports](https://github.com/icyphox/alpine): My APKBUILDs for
52  Alpine.
53- [detotated](https://github.com/icyphox/detotated): An IRC bot written
54  in Python. See [IRC for DMs](/blog/irc-for-dms).
55- [icyrc](https://github.com/icyphox/icyrc): A no bullshit IRC client,
56  because WeeChat is bloat.
57
58I probably missed something, but whatever.
59
60## Blog posts
61
62```
63$ ls -1 pages/blog/*.md | wc -l
6420
65```
66
67So excluding today's post, and `_index.md`, that's 18 posts! I had
68initially planned to write one post a month, but hey, this is great. My
69plan for 2020 is to write one post a _week_ -- unrealistic, I know, but
70I will try nevertheless.
71
72I wrote about a bunch of things, ranging from programming to
73return-oriented-programming (heh), sysadmin and security stuff, and
74a hint of culture and philosophy. Nice!
75
76The [Python for Reverse Engineering](/blog/python-for-re-1) post got
77a ton of attention on the interwebz, so that was cool.
78
79## Bye 2019
80
812019 was super productive! (in my terms). I learnt a lot of new things
82last year, and I can only hope to learn as much in 2020. :)
83
84I'll see you next week.