Just published this weekend's side project - wordle-operator, which lets you play Wordle from your Kubernetes cluster!

I've been wanting to build a Kubernetes operator as a weekend project for a little while now, and Wordle's been on my (and the internet's collective) mind lately. So, I decided to mash the two together so that you can play Wordle on any Kubernetes cluster.

Decided to brush up on my React skills during some of my winter downtime by learning NextJS. Managed to put together a fun little landing page by leveraging a little bit of Tailwind and some Fontawesome icons.

Building one-off web pages gives me a similar sort of calm to doing art, except instead of brushes and pencils, it's divs and class names. I'm not necessarily very good at it, but it's a relaxing hobby, and it's really satisfying to change a line of code and see instant results.

Published my own version of of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, one of the first natural language processing computer programs.

I'm a huge fan of Zachtronics games, so when I discovered that their game Eliza was loosely based on a real computer program from the 60's, I had to try my hand at implementing it for myself.

Re-read Black Hat Python again over my winter break as it just caught my eye while I was organizing my ebook collection. Decided that I would follow along and implement the exercises myself this time. I think the book is very accessible if you have prior python knowledge, and the examples are succinct yet powerful.

I've also been thinking about the topic of Threat Modeling a lot recently, specifically how to make it approachable for developers, and how we can boost collaboration between development teams and security teams. I firmly believe that being able to "think like a hacker" is a crucial skillset when it comes to designing secure systems.

I'm not sure if or how some of the ideas from Black Hat Python will make it into future developer training that gets put together in 2022, but I definitely got a lot of value and ideas from my second read-through.

Spoke at Hack Hours about two things I picked up from Dave Beazley's Advanced Programming course. Link to code examples and README.

1. The State Machine pattern - a useful way to break complex conditional logic into individual classes. Each class is then easier to reason about, because it only represents one side of a conditional, so there's no if/else/or/and/not to reason about.
2. Design by "Wishful Thinking" - sometimes also referred to as "top-down design". This one is covered a lot more in-depth in the SICP book and video lectures, but the basic idea is to write your program as if there was a set of library functions that already existed that did exactly what you wanted (including taking the parameters you had in mind and returning the result in your preferred format). After repeating this over and over, you have the skeleton for your entire program, and can go back and figure out the implementation details for the smaller parts.

Just wrapped up an amazing week-long course entitled Advanced Programming with Python taught by Dave Beazley. Met a bunch of really smart folks in the course, and learned several new problem-solving techniques; I highly recommend it.