Weekly Retro on dade

Weekly Retro 2025-W17

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 10:06:41 -0700

It’s been a very eventful time since my last retro. I went home and spent some time with my family and had a good time getting to have a family holiday meal for the first time in several years. But I also found out the company I’ve been working at is being acquired, and this has me feeling some type of way.

So let me tell you a little bit about my first startup experience.

Weekly Retro 2025-W15

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:08:18 -0700

I’m a day late, and it’s going to be a erratic one. You see, I spent most of my weekend away from the computer, which included not setting aside the time to write this that I normally would. I can’t say it was entirely intentional, at least not at first. But by the end of Sunday, it was definitely a conscious choice I was making, to not jump on the computer. To not feel the pressure I put on myself with great frequency to be “productive.”

Weekly Retro 2025-W14

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 13:15:17 -0700

Refocusing my priorities, and a handful of improvements to my website, including a share button and a js-free collapsible menu.

Weekly Retro 2025-W13

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 22:02:05 -0700

I’ve been reflecting a lot this week on the type of work I enjoy doing, and I’m starting my home energy monitoring journey.

Weekly Retro 2025-W12

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 17:31:52 -0700

Building boilerplate for a SaaS app, the joy of deleting and simplifying, and upgrading Hugo.

Weekly Retro 2025-W11

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 21:35:33 -0700

8 years of Red Team Summit, my first sponsored Con event, and more DNS data collection work.

Weekly Retro 2025-W10

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:06:05 -0700

Graph databases, Bell Labs, and Tiling Window Managers for macOS. A week of accidental obsessions.

Weekly Retro 2025-W09

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 10:46:21 -0800

This week I spent a lot of time working on writing more Protocol episodes. The fourth episode went out, covering an intro to DNS, and I didn’t have the next episode ready to go yet. I also spent a bit of time customizing my MacOS experience to use Aerospace, Raycast, and Wezterm.

March Video Schedule

In March, I am releasing four episodes of Protocol, as follows:

March 5th, 2025: Intro to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
March 12th, 2025: Telnet
March 19th, 2025: Secure Shell (SSH)
March 26th, 2025: Intro to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

Additionally, I would like to publish one video about a red teaming topic, of which I have several backlogged ideas to work on. I feel like I got a system in place for Protocol episodes, but doing other videos now feels harder because its less clear the direction I want to take. So hopefully I can get some done and remove some of the weight of uncertainty.

Weekly Retro 2025-W08

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 12:38:51 -0800

I got obsessed with a problem at work this week - how do you build a useful audit log framework, where the audit logs are useful and the framework is easy for developers to integrate with. Boy what a rabbit hole. This weekend I spent a good chunk of time workin on my Natlas rewrite in Django, keeping in mind some of my immediate learnings about audit logs.

Weekly Retro 2025-W07

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 15:30:41 -0800

This is going to be a pretty short one, I had an all-week event at work last week so I didn’t have a lot of time to do things that I would talk about on here.

Sephiroth Updates

Sephiroth is a tool I wrote many years ago to help build block lists for common server platforms that might want to behave differently for different IP addresses. It is so named because the main target was “I want to block the cloud”, and I liked Final Fantasy 7.