Work updates

We launched some significant new features this year; I’m a co-discoverer of my very first CVE in rustls – debugging that in our test environment was quite interesting and challenging.

Life debugging lessons: it’s always somewhere in the riskiest change made recently. For us, it was the newish TLS library that was the breadcrumb.

As of March, I’m now a “Technical Director”, which is Fortanix-speak for something like a Staff or Principal Engineer. I’m frequently meeting with product, marketing, leadership, reporting on progress, discussing how to implement bigger picture items, and that has been both challenging and rewarding.

Life updates

One of my former Smith students came up with a proposal and received the Fulbright which is kind of a BIG DEAL, and I’m incredibly proud of her. I’m delighted to still be in touch with a number of my former students.

Central Rock Gym, where I climb frequently, runs a “mile high challenge” every year; due to some work travel, my partner and I finished this month-long challenge (climb 5,280 feet; a typical climbing wall is between 30 and 50ft tall) in about a week. It was really tough, but we did it!

We now have a metal roof, because asphalt roofs are designed to fail every 12-15 years and are terrible for the environment. With a lifetime estimate of 50 years, we should basically never have to replace it. Once all the inspections are done, we’ll have a bunch of solar panels clipped to the roof.

I feel like all search engines have gotten noticeably worse recently. Perhaps some of it is the content on the internet degrading in quality; but I like to be able to ask the internet simple factoid questions, like the temperature which to cook certain meats without the risk of getting a disease for either my computer or my stomach.

Reflections

I’ve been looking over some of my digital archive; and found a pile of quotes I loved as a high school student. It’s been fun to look over some of my earlier creativity and reflect.

"Peor será esto que los molinos de viento -- dijo Sancho --"
- Cervantes

I loved learning Spanish and the bits of Don Quijote that we read. One of my lifelong regrets is that I received a 5/5 on the AP Spanish Language exam and I didn’t need to continue studying it in college; I’d earned all the credits I could. Apologies for the humblebrag, but what else is a blog for?