In jiu jitsu there’s a training method called positional sparring, sometimes called specific training. These two names refer to a training format where two people will start in a set position with defined parameters on where they start and when they stop. The power of this training is that it gives you repeated practice for something you’re trying to learn that focuses specifically on that technique, this is very different to open sparring where you may only find yourself in a position you’re trying to learn once or twice in a round. ...

I’ve been going through a pretty big hiring process at work lately, it’s not the first time I’ve had to scale a team up to handle changing business requirements and take more ownership of the company’s platform. When I look at building this sort of team I need to build a mental model in my head of the upcoming work for the team and the realistic complexity of the work. There’s no point in hiring high-end senior engineers if they are going to be working on simple, small fixes, inversely there’s no point in hiring mid-career engineers who won’t have the experience to deal with complex and difficult problems. ...

“Right tool for the job”, it’s a phrase you’ll hear in any field. I mean, really, who wants to use the wrong tool for the job? The phrase can mean different things to different people, sometimes it means you’re using a new framework that is purpose-built for your task and sometimes it means using a tried and true method your team is familiar with and operates quickly with. It’s not always obvious to know when you’re using the right or wrong tool and explaining that to company leaders can be difficult, especially when budgets will be increased or a project will take longer. ...

This post might seem a little out of place on this blog. That’s because it’s part of a Feature Writing subject I’m taking as part of my university studies. Enjoy it and read about the subject here: https://www.deakin.edu.au/courses/unit?unit=ALJ216 You’ve probably seen online classes in specialised subjects through universities, Coursera and Lynda and might have even heard of Udemy and edX but did you know that there are thousands of people running their own online courses for virtually any topic? These are people taking their authority and knowledge and turning it into profitable side businesses. ...

Closures are a style of writing JavaScript that provides object data privacy. What this seems to mean is that you can define a function within another function. Your child function will be able to access things from the parent function, but the parent function will not be able to access variables in the child function unless it explicitly calls the child function. The child function might also choose to return only a subset of data that it was provided. This is called partial application. ...

On Thursday night Megan and I travelled to Canberra for our second BSides Canberra event. We attended our first BSides in April last year and had a great time. It’s also how we discovered locksport and it’s what got Megan interested in security more generally. BSidesCBR had a different venue this year and we couldn’t have been happier with it. This year BSides was hosted at the National Convention Centre. We aren’t from Canberra so being able to stay close to the venue while not being stuck in the middle of no where was really good for us too. ...

BSides Wrap-up Right now I’m sitting in the airport bar, reflecting on the great weekend that Megan and I have had at BSides Canberra 2018. This was my first cybersecurity conference and the weekend ended up having a few firsts for myself. I don’t want to write too much about this so will try to keep it brief and categorised to include: the talks, people and villages. Hacking the human black box at #BSidesCbr18 is one of the funniest talks so far. Very informative as well! #BSidesCbr pic.twitter.com/xD4yaKlroK ...

This essay was written for the 2017/2018 Secureworx essay competition. The essay question was: “How is cyber security a human issue?” My essay was chosen as 1 of 2 winners and received a $2000 cash prize. Information security has ultimately always been a human problem. It is humans whom the machines serve, humans that attack them and humans that are often the weakest point in the security chain. Computer security used to be about preventing viruses or worms that would delete hard drives or use too many resources eventually forcing the machine to restart but now as the malware community has developed so too have their goals. Ransomware, Remote Admin Tools (RATs) and more have been used to target anyone from home users all the way through to international shipping companies and nuclear facilities. Malware has become commoditized, a product for dark web users to buy and sell on hidden forums before turning their products on their true targets. ...

We all know and love using variables in our SASS files, it’s basically the most often used selling point for SASS and LESS and along with things like mixins and nesting it’s what I use the most out of all of those tools’ features. Using CSS Variables CSS Variables are super easy to use. If you’ve used a CSS preprocessor before you already know how they work and why we’d use them. I’ll give the rest of the audience a quick run through though. ...

Why CSS Grid caught my attention It seems like everywhere I’ve been lurking lately including the office has had people talk about CSS grid and what it means for developers and how we build websites. I sat down this week to really try and understand CSS grid, what it does and how it works. I’m a huge fan of Flexbox so I initially I didn’t care as much. I think now that I’m spending more time looking at it I think CSS grid coupled with Flexbox is going to be the way to go in the future and put us all out of a job, especially with AI and Machine Learning building websites for us. ...