Recent content in Home on aswin's blog
Year 3 at work and tech Work and tech stuff since last blog post has continued to be around multiple different projects with multiple project titles. It’s now 3 years since I started working at a company, so it was time to collect and write down everything I’ve been working on in the past year to see where I’m at. This blog is kind of a draft, still. I’ve become an ardent enthusiast of…
In March 2025, I was considering doing something: Considering to expand and merge a couple of my drafts: 1. Draft titled "Design, analysis, and operations of my (internal) app" (Web apps, software engineering, browser automation, SAML, polling, animations) 2. Drafts about the internal server infrastructure I built for… — aswin c (@chandanaveli) March 12, 2025 My work life has revolved around…
Hey, we’re back. The cadence of these notes will vary like a meandering river as it was not easy to connect different things and also keep the same voice – “I am not an expert; I’m just writing it down as I fare forward and figure it out” throughout the blog. I also feel this blog post lacks a certain standard of emotional density that I thought this would have when I…
This is the caption I wrote for an Instagram post about Jerusalem, when I visited it in July 2022. More about the trip can be read on a previous post − Notes from Israel . Recently, I read it again and thought it was post-worthy, so here it is: To get lost in the beauty and the aesthetics of the Old City of Jerusalem, you won’t need to try or look closely. The city naturally presents…
This is a rundown of my experience of a visit I made to my hometown and family in September 2023. There’s a place where I build and keep some personal narratives, and I found this there while searching for something else yesterday. I felt that it was post-worthy so here it is. My September visit to home—a week-long halt at Chalakudy—ended on the thirteenth and I have come back to the city…
For reading or giving feedback, social proof, comments, and further discussion, see the following Twitter thread . Table of contents The years 2019: starting out 2020: just Aswin and his computer 2021: changing landscapes 2022: saying yes to new things 2023: to infinity and beyond In retrospect Amritapuri Campus My years teambi0s Reminders about life and career Looking at the future – the world is…
Table of contents SubCom The internship and work Reflections Closing I worked at Subconscious Compute —a toddler of a startup at Bengaluru for 5 months—and I know I can write this post in two ways: like a typical Glassdoor review of the company, or like one of my usual blog posts – a candor walk-through of something that was new to me with some gratitude towards the end. From day one, I wanted to…
Table of contents Delhi – the journey begins Shalom, Israel First meet-up party in the dorm lawns The university Be’er Sheva central park Attending the pizza party Bengi’s bar Startup tour at HiTech park Eilat Coral beach Be’er Sheva city The old city Food street Jerusalem The Western Wall King David’s fort Church of the Holy Sepulchre The market and the old city Mount of Olives…
Oh, hi! This is a blog post about the things I stumbled upon when I thought I’ll give OpenBSD a go. Therefore, this post is going to sound more like a walkthrough than an ordinary blog post. The reason why I decided to try it out was primarily for the learning experience, and to use it as a hobby OS- something you boot up every once in a while when you want to slow down and relax a bit.…
Couple months ago, I had participated in the CSAW Embedded Security Challenges (ESC)- a perennial competition about security of embedded systems and devices. Each year, the competition comes with a different theme and the time around, it was about Side Channel and Fault Injection attacks with the ChipWhisperer Nano. The team and I had a fun time learning and getting used to them. This blog is…
Hi all, This blog post is a brief summary about the work I did on the summer of 2021 with Rizin on adding support for CPU and platform profiles. Title of the project Support for CPU and platform profiles Synopsis Rizin previously relied upon manually writing code for adding a new CPU or an IO port. This implementation was unfit as the vast and growing ecology of hardware components such as CPUs…
I must begin by expressing the joy that is unspeakable to be born in this era and to be using this impressive technology that is computers, to the fullest and is thankful to be able to develop software on them with the least effort and price than it was ever before. For that, I think I must heed the engineers of the past, who knew what they were doing, and to the companies for manufacturing…
In this blog post, we will look at reverse engineering and solving a RISC-V binary, which was the challenge for qualifying for the CSAW 2020 Embedded Security Challenge (ESC), using the reverse engineering tool Ghidra SRE. Ghidra SRE, out of the box, does not support analyzing binaries for the RISC-V architecture. In order to get around that, we will be setting up a special RISC-V Ghidra…
For inCTF International Edition 2020, I had so much fun in making a Gameboy ROM reversing challenge. This is the writeup for the same. Invisible Maze tl;dr Challenge is a Nintendo GameBoy ROM image. Reverse the ROM and figure out the implementation Analyze the calling function’s checks to find the path along which we must move. Challenge points : 936 No. of solves : 13 Challenge Authors :…
Lately, I had got a reversing challenge compiled for MIPS architecture and I struggled a bit as I couldn’t find a lot information on the web on how to analyze or debug it properly. The is a small writeup on how I learned about MIPS and completed the challenge. Emulator QEMU is probably the best emulator out there and QEMU lets you emulate a MIPS Malta system If you are on Ubuntu, you can get…
A simple manual to help you start working with your Bus Pirate . Useful links To learn about what the device can do for you, I’d suggest starting somewhere near Sparkfun’s article or the Bus Pirate 102 manual Flashing the firmware After connecting the Bus Pirate, and cloning the Bus Pirate repository , simply navigate to the folder package . You should know about the version of the Bus…
Lately, I happened to lay my hands on one of the hottest topic on the tech world, the Raspberry Pi. For those who haven’t heard about it, the Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. When I held the Pi in my palm, the first thing I realized is that, like a real raspberry, it was indeed, very small.
Hello, I’m Aswin I’m a 23 year old Malayali , currently living in Bengaluru. I love to do software engineering, writing, photo-videography, and play music. I like creating, solving, and working on things and products people want to use. as far back as i can remember, i always wanted to work on cool products. https://t.co/Beu9hkQ0qM — aswin c (@chandanaveli) May 22, 2025 Top links…
This is a list of books I’ve read and enjoyed. This page is inspired from Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf. “Since the stacks and shelves lack any particular order, so too does this list.” Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari Life-altering insights about human origins, civilization, religion, empires, science, technology, and human nature. An Era of…
Talks State of Rust in the Linux kernel – a talk I gave at Bangalore Rust community’s October 2023 meetup: Slides Summer of Code at Rizin - a talk I gave at FOSSMEC on December 2 2022, where I talked about my Google Summer of Code project, the experience, and insights: Slides A brief history of UNIX and Linux - an internal talk at teambi0s : Slides Software projects These are some of my…
Table of contents: Writing Photography Filmography Music Writing Apart from the posts from the blog tab of the same website, here are links to some of my most well-received writing: Write-up and a character sketch about one of my best friend from university: instagram A satrical take on what happens in a day at the gents’ dorms at my university: Menon Sir was sleeping in My submission for…
This is the collection of some of the best tweets I’ve posted and read, and some of the best articles I’ve read on the internet that I’ve bookrmarked. You can see a part of the collection on my TweetLists profile: TweetLists and the rest below. Title URL Tags Content type How to use Twitter https://x.com/chandanaveli/status/1776960432693039369 observation my-tweet All creative…