Cecil's blog - insights on technology and science
I went to my first Black Hat with security already eating my calendar at remberg: an ISO 27001 push, a fresh pen test, and an AI audit of our own code. This is what actually stuck, from why AI makes offense cheap enough that defense has to change shape, to the attacks now aimed at AI systems themselves, to the idea nearly every good session kept returning to: you can't defend what you have not…
A decade ago a compulsory course at TUM made me write OCaml and prove programs correct. I was lost for the first few weeks, and the way of thinking it forced on me never went away. This post is about what that course taught me about correctness and type systems, and how it still shapes the way we build our TypeScript codebase at remberg today.
In 2012 I wrote about switching to zsh and oh-my-zsh. 14 years later I spent two days modernizing the same dotfiles repo. I retired oh-my-zsh as a framework in favor of sheldon and starship, picked up mise, atuin, delta, and a handful of small modern CLI swaps, and deleted whatever I was no longer using. This post walks through what I kept, replaced, and deleted, plus the quirks that surfaced…
Agency has become quite the buzzword on tech Twitter/X over the past year or so. I picked up what the word actually means at a Stanford high school summer program in 2012 and turned it into a habit at the CDTM in Munich between 2016 and 2018. Ten years out from when I applied, I wrote down what stuck: the seminars and the project work, the self-organized research semesters in the US, the friction…
Two weeks ago a rework of our forms backend landed in our monorepo, built on NestJS, the fourth framework in the remberg stack. The frontend, the mobile app, and the backend all run TypeScript now. The first step there happened more or less by chance, an Angular choice in 2018, and every step after it was deliberate. Here is what one language across the whole stack actually bought us, and the part…
Fogernetes
If you've used your current Linux or Mac computer for a while, you might have encountered a rather cluttered home directory. Every small utility and library claims just another file or folder for themselves. Since these files and folders all start with a dot (e.g. ".ssh"), they shouldn't usually be shown in your file browser. But, if you enable to show hidden files by default your home directory…
Just two weeks ago, I saw a tweet by @holman, complaining about the current state of favicons on the internet. For those of you who don't know what a "favicon" is: It is short for favorite icon and is a small image that is representative of a website. It usually shows up before the URL or inside of a tab in your browser. After I saw that tweet, I decided to also improve this website in order to…
In the fall of 2017, after finishing my bachelor thesis in Munich, I did an exchange semester at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta as a Visiting Researcher at the Research Network Operations Center. Here is a look at what my time there was like — the research, the coursework, and the experience of being back in the US.
Ever since I first took up a class back in high school, I was hoping to become fluent in another language. Unfortunately, I dropped out of that high school class after the first week was over: I had already become tired of having to learn vocabulary each and every day. This aversion towards learning vocabulary made it impossible for me to make progress back then. Creating habits around language…