My first job in technology was a QA internship. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I tested the first release of Paradox for Windows at Borland. As an intern, I started by following someone else’s QA test plan – dutifully checking each test off the list. After a few weeks, I knew my…

I’d been meaning to write this up for a while, and now Nat Pryce has written up the 140 character version . This is all Chris Matts ‘ idea. He realised that the problem with the “Technical Debt” metaphor is that for managers debt can be a good thing. Executives can be required to take on more debt…

Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process. Here is a short guide to get you started. Do Attract, nurture,…

Last week saw the public disclosure of the POODLE vulnerability, a practical attack allowing a network attacker to steal plaintext from HTTPS connections. In particular, this attack can be used to steal authentication cookies. It’s a bad vulnerability, and it particularly hurts because it should…

Unstructured programming with GOTO is the stuff of legend, as are calling subroutines by line number--GOSUB 1000--and setting global variables as a mechanism for passing parameters. The little language that fueled the home computer revolution has been long buried beneath an avalanche of derision, or…

Bill (not his real name, and I’ve fuzzed some details to protect his identity) is a software engineer on the East Coast, who, at the time (between 2011 and 2014) of this story, had recently turned 30 and wanted to see if he could enter a higher weight class on the job market. In order to best assess…

Idle Words > Talks > The Internet With A Human Face This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference. "Marc," I told him, "my talk…

Posted Fri 16 May 2014 Author Serge Guelton Category Programming Tags Python, obfuscation, programming, 2014 Where building a custom obfuscated Python interpreter for a Python packer turned into an optimized Python interpreter. The paper Looking inside the (Drop) box) from Przemysław Węgrzyn and…

March 21 March 23 March 26 March 28 Previous Next-> The JoyPoll was... If you could do anything to your competition's employees, what would it be? Poach them! Fry them! Assimilate them all. Become one of them. Work co-operatively with them. Bah! I have no competition! View the Results The JoyBase!…

After reading: http://t.co/rPzvRLVbMR I played 2048 using “up-right (repeat), left if stuck” strategy. Scored 5384. Didn’t even know rules.

The best paper you’ll ever read on computer security: https://t.co/EH2lJZFHcs