Why this blog?

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Whenever I come across a problem I look on google for answers. Every now and then the answer is not straightforward and I have to do some ingenious thinking. This blog allows me to share my finding with other developers.

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The software that I love

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Pride. When interviewing candidates I always ask "tell me something that you are proud of." Sometimes you get a blank stare. That person is down and dealing with some shit. Luckily most of the time the eyes light up and the person starts talking about them at their best . I love those moments. As in Peter Thiel's "From 0 to 1", I want to see the best in people and then see if we can deal with the bad. In the end, I ask "so this is all great, but what will we have to learn to live with if we hire you?". On the one hand I'd like to prepare myself, but the question tests for self-reflection too. It works well. But back to proud. I've been dealing with some shit too, and there have been a bit more downs than ups lately. This blog post/diary is a way to make my eyes sparkle and remind myself of the things I have built and still love. These are short stories in chronological order. There's a lot more to life than software, but this focused forma
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Things I Didn't Build Yet

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Here are some ideas I've been thinking about for a long time. In some cases I've started a prototype, in others it's just some thoughts. There are too many ideas for me to build in a lifetime, so I'm just posting them here, even though I might work on some in the future. Ideas are cheap, execution is hard. If you're interested in starting a business based on this, please let me know as a courtesy :) I just want these solutions to exist so I can use them. Discuss these ideas on hacker news CloudSound Software businesses are silent. Let's change that. CloudSound makes your business events audible from a Chrome tab. You stream your logs to cloudsound and you can hear what's happening with a custom soundboard. A payment made? Ka-ching! An error? <alarm>. New customer? Get in tha choppah! At some point if there's a lot of traffic it can be made into acoustically pleasing ambient sounds. The way game music changes if there's an end-boss. The idea is
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Parsing 10TB of Metadata, 26M Domain Names and 1.4M SSL Certs for $10 on AWS

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Last May I was working on hobby project similar to this:  https://github.com/zakjan/cert-chain-resolver/  . As I found the cert-chain-resolver project a couple of days later I did nothing with the results, but I got some nice comments on how I used 1 VM to download & process 10TB in a couple of hours on this HN thread recently so I decided to do a write up on the process and publish the data. See the parts below: Part 1: downloading 10TB of metadata in 4 hours Part 2: fetching a ****load of certificates Part 3: playing with the data Total costs My approach was somewhat different from the github project above, instead of using the AIA extension I wanted to brute-force the solution by finding all known intermediate and root certificates in advance. Based on the checksum of the issuer/subject fields I could look up which certificates "claimed" to be the signer of the certificate and then using the signature I could filter out which ones actually were. You can us
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