The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Advent of Code: Day 6

2015-12-06

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Part 1: Given a 1000 by 1000 grid of lights and a list of instructions of the form (turn on|turn off|toggle) 5,10 through 15,20, determine how many lights are on.

Advent of Code: Day 5

2015-12-05

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Part 1: A ’nice’ string contains at least three vowels, one double letter (such as xx), and none of the strings ab, cd, pq, or xy. Count nice strings.

Advent of Code: Day 4

2015-12-04

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Part 1: Mine Adventcoins. Basically, find the lowest integer such that the string {prefix}{integer} has an md5 hash with at least 5 leading zeros. ¹²³

Advent of Code: Day 3

2015-12-03

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Part 1: Given a string of <>^v characters which mean move west, east, north, or south respectively and starting at the origin, how many unique positions do you pass through?

Advent of Code: Day 2

2015-12-02

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Part 1: A gift requires enough wrapping paper to cover the surface plus an additional amount equal to the area smallest side. Calculate the total wrapping paper needed for a list of dimensions of the form 2x3x4.

Glorious Gification of HipChat Rooms

2015-12-02

To counter yesterday’s post on Iterating the GitHub API, how about something a little more lighthearted today: GIFs¹.

Advent of Code: Day 1

2015-12-01

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Part 1: Given a string of () characters controlling a simulated elevator, where ( means ‘go up’ and ) means ‘go down’, what floor do you end up on?

Advent of Code

2015-12-01

I’m always on the lookout for new sources of quick¹ coding puzzles. This holiday season, Advent of Code scratches precisely that itch.

Advent of Code is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon different skills and has two parts that build on a theme. – About - Advent of Code

I’ve been working out each problem thus far in Python (my language of choice; along with Racket). I’m backfilling the first seven posts (along with this one), but I’ll try to do the rest daily.

Iterating the GitHub API (For users sans MFA)

2015-12-01

Today I found myself auditing an organization’s users to see which have multifactor authentication enabled¹. Since we have a not insignificant number of users, I wanted to write a quick script to automate it. Down the rabbit hole I go… and now I have a clean way of iterating across paginated GitHub API responses.

Finding EC2 instances by tag

2015-10-30

Another script similar to my previous post about Finding AWS IAM users by access key. This time, we want to do much the same thing for EC2 instances by tag.