Four years of writing on the internet
A few observations and thoughts about writing on the internet for four years.
Doing fewer, bigger things
📝 This is post #130, meaning only 20 pieces this year. It’s much less than prior years, down from 32 and 42 posts per year the past two. This was my busiest year so far, for better and worse. Writing less seems like a reasonable trade for all the learning.
🎤 It was a thrill to speak a few places this year.
- There I FIPS’d It at DistrictCon: Year 1 , perhaps proving that comedy is tragedy plus time, but also all the lessons learned doing a very specific type of work in cryptography to not make the same mistakes.
- You didn’t miss the boat on AI in cybersecurity at the Boulder Secure AI & DevOps meetup. There was this sad tone of FOMO on new graduates having been a year or two too late, so I took an invitation to be upbeat and share a few places to get started having survived a few of these trends already.
- Container Escapes 101 was expanded, updated for 2026, and presented again at BSides Boulder and the AppSec Village at DEF CON 34 .
💖 The talks and the writing feed each other. Container Escapes 101 grew out of a pile of posts from last year. The other two ran the other direction - give the talk, then write it up here so it outlives the room it was presented in. Twenty posts is low, but some are things I’d have had no reason to write down otherwise.
Writing less, building more
👾 I made the choice to play with tech again and carved out time for it. It wasn’t enough to tell myself I’d be able to do “side project” stuff again one day. If it wasn’t blocked out, it wouldn’t happen. The homelab got some new hardware, network stuff got a refresh, and AI feels like much more than a nifty IDE extension. It’s refreshing to have some cycles to play around with low-impact fun again.
🔍 Building is still addictively fun, but it’s a different fun with different tools. I added a few new tools to my website with varying amounts of AI assistance, which I’ll write more about soon. It started with the SARIF viewer to work with others to interactively look at static analysis results files from anything a customer uses. This had to be live, usually with customer teams too. Many times this feature is part of a bigger, paid platform. SARIF is a simple format and AI whipped together a working website in an hour or so.
🎣 It’s easy to get hooked on writing little fixes to little problems. I’ve added an XML viewer and JSON viewer, a QR code generator, and image tools to edit images for my website, and at least eight more. None of these were any considerable effort, but they were all fun and fast and helpful.
🎨 Custom, interactive slides are silly easy with AI. It does the bulk of the work for custom formatting from my markdown, then I edit and polish it. I loved using reveal.js for sales tech calls to explain hard topics in easy ways. I took this to the non-sales job to do things and it works well here too. My deck for container escapes is the simplest example, but I’ve been able to use it to demonstrate how AI orchestrates recon and attacks against a target interactively, a step-by-step threat model for supply chain attacks, and more.
Problems have lots of shapes
A change of pace can be both refreshing and exhausting.
🌀 You can never go back, but the door still opens. I wrote this two years ago and now, as a “comeback kid” at a former employer, I’d revise it. I came back, but the place I left years ago is no longer there. I’m a very different engineer now and work on new problems. Even if I’m working with some of the same folks, they have had other learnings this time too. They’ve grown, I’ve grown, the organization has changed … it sometimes feels like the only thing that didn’t change was my (now-reactivated) work email address.
🔧 Made the switch back to engineering. Much of my efficacy in sales engineering came from being an engineer with deep applied knowledge of systems. After a few years away, it started to feel like I was missing a change in how teams worked. I was. The work itself changed shape, not just the interchangeable “tech stack” components. I guess we’re all engineering managers now is the long version of these thoughts, and reviewing slop is what that looks like between actual humans who like each other.
👾 Real life comes first with job changes and life changes and a bunch of other personal stuff going on. It’s okay to be busy. Writing, playing with tech that isn’t my immediate job, hobbies, and so much more is a side quest and not the main story line.
Another year
Last year’s challenge was to “do cool stuff and tell people about it”. I did alright on the cool stuff. I did terribly about telling people about it. It’s a good goal to try for again.
🌷 The flowers in the title picture are “lipstick mini” tulips that grew near me last spring. I hope to see them for many more years, but I’m not sure if they stored enough energy to come back next year.