Recent content in blog.lvmbdv.dev on Ata Kuyumcu's Blog
I made dailyprog public. The code is on Codeberg now, under AGPL-3.0 . The license was the easy decision. The problem was everything the code needs to run. A puzzle site’s whole point is the puzzles, and the puzzle files carry the hidden tests, the ones you only get graded against after you submit. Publish the catalogue and you’ve published every answer, plus every puzzle I…
Update, 2026-08-13 The title lasted eight hours. Four sessions have reached depth 13, and all four walked back out through the arch with their gold: 178, 252, 273 and 635. The rest of the post is left as it was. The dungeon under this blog has a bottom now. Depth 13, with a sensible end to the gameplay loop. The rest of this post is three-ish days of analytics from the dungeon , and the caveats…
There's a follow-up The dungeon has a bottom now, at depth 13. I also pulled three days of numbers out of it: how people got in, where they die, and whether two strangers ever found each other down there. Nobody has reached the bottom (yet) There’s a dungeon under this blog, every page of it. Find the way in and you get a little pixel character (a knight, a wizard, a princess etc; it depends…
My CV has a test suite. This is either reasonable or a symptom. The excuse is that I’m not the first reader. An applicant tracking system is, and it wants text. Every visual decision in the document (the font, the margins, where the dates sit) is invisible to it. The only thing it can see is whatever pdftotext scrapes off the page.
I use Mastodon on and off but I would not trade it for any alternative atm. Not because it’s better than Twitter was, the discoverability is worse, the reply threading is too complex at times, and it does have sync issues across instances. What it does have is something no corporate platform will ever offer: you can leave and take your social graph with you. Your followers, your follows,…
dailyprog needs a new puzzle every day. I wrote the first few drafts by hand, then built a generator that writes them with an LLM and validates the output against real sandbox execution. The generator works, but it still needs someone to run it. Pick a pattern, kick off the script, review the result, commit. Fifteen minutes on a good day. More if the model gets stuck in a repair loop and I need to…
dailyprog (the daily coding puzzle site, previously ) started with JavaScript. Then Python, then C. Each new language was a different kind of project. Python needed Pyodide . C needed a PicoC WASM binary and a custom harness for printf output. Go was supposed to be the fourth. Every Go-to-WASM tutorial points at the same path, so I took it. It was the wrong one. The path everyone takes: GOOS=js…
I saw this cool ethernet tap and thought it would be cool to see how chatty my “smart” TV is. But I didn’t want to pay €39 for it. So I made a clone on mini breadboards.
I have been working on this daily coding puzzle site dailyprog . It’s like Wordle for programming problems. Each day you get one puzzle with a short narrative, a function stub, and a set of visible test cases. You write a solution, run it locally against the visible tests, then submit to verify against hidden tests on the server. There are four languages atm (JavaScript, Python, C, Go),…
Two months ago I wrote down my baseline for hardening a fresh Linux install . Non-root user, SSH lockdown, UFW, fail2ban, unattended-upgrades, the Docker firewall hole. It was fine as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough. Last week I spun up a new VPS (Debian 13 this time, not Ubuntu) and found six I’d missed the first time around. Post-quantum SSH is also ready and takes one…
I rebuilt this blog recently. Not a redesign. The old posts are still here, same URLs, same markup. What changed is that every page now carries a full structured data graph and every element is annotated with microformats . Structured data that pulls its weight Every page gets a JSON-LD block in the <head> . Not a plugin. A 120-line Hugo partial that builds a @graph depending on what kind of page…
I was planning a backup setup and dug an old SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD out of a drawer. Plugged it in, nothing. Well, not nothing. dmesg saw a USB device. sg_inq got a polite response from the bridge chip, but the kernel logged “Media removed, stopped polling” and the block device reported zero bytes. The USB-to-NVMe bridge chip was alive and as chatty. The SSD behind it was gone.…
Albion Online has a cool design constraint that sounds absurd when you say it out loud: every item in the game is player-crafted. There are no NPC vendors selling gear. The world produces nothing on its own except raw resources. The whole sandbox is built on top of that constraint. But Albion also has mobs that drop loot. You go fight a heretic, you sometimes get a T4 bag. So somebody has to have…
I’ve been running a small Hetzner VPS for a while now and every time I spin up a new one I find myself re-deriving the same baseline. This is that baseline, written down so I stop re-deriving it and so you can steal it. It assumes Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on a Hetzner VPS, but most things hardly change over the years, or between platforms. None of this is exhaustive, there’s no AppArmor…
Historical context This post was written for Bevy 0.4 in February 2021. Bevy is now on 0.15+ and the APIs have changed significantly. The extension trait pattern is still valid Rust, but the specific Commands , Command , and Bundle APIs in Bevy have evolved since. For current documentation, see bevyengine.org and docs.rs/bevy . Bevy is an ECS-based game engine built in Rust. Extension traits are a…
Restic is a program that greatly simplifies the process of encrypted, incremental backups. Backblaze B2 is a pretty cheap cloud storage service that restic happens to support as a data storage backend. The first 10 GB of storage is free, which is plenty for storing configuration files and some source code.
I started reading through “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” and thought it would be a good idea to publish my progress here. Here are my solutions for the first ten exercises in the book.
Here are a few challenges I chose to write about from the preliminary for STM CTF 2018 which will take place in Ankara at Oct 31. I want to thank the STM team for a fun and smooth CTF experience. I started competing in CTFs about half a year ago and I heard good things about STM CTF 2017. I hope I can attend this year :)
I participated in DKHOS alongside bloodlust (formerly yubitsec) this year but this post is not about that. While we were waiting for DKHOS to start at midnight, we decided to warm up with another CTF that was going on at the time. That CTF was Harekaze 2018.
It was called “The Neverending Crypto”. I don’t remember what difficulty level it was listed at, probably the lowest :) Here is how it went. You are presented with an address and a port number. When you connect, you are asked to enter a string. The string you entered is encrypted and sent back to you. After a few tries, I realize it’s encrypted with a Caesar cipher.
Introduction I’m Ata. Software Engineer, based in the Amsterdam Area. I’ve spent the last few years at Shell Recharge Solutions building serverless, event-driven systems in TypeScript on AWS, including a quarter as interim Tech Lead. Before that: full-stack work at Countly , a handful of short-term contracts, and the CTF competitions that show up all over this blog. Right now I’m…