TL;DR: I’m working through the Cryptopals Cryptography Challenges, starting with knowing nothing about cryptography. These are my (not so) random notes and takeaways from them. They generally seem to follow a pattern of introducing a concept in cryptography (repeating key XOR, ECB mode, CBC mode, stream ciphers, etc) and then having you break it in some way(s). I’m hoping to turn my notes on some of these in to more detailed posts at some point, but for now, this mostly ‘stream of thought’ that I’m updating as I work through them.
TL;DR: Use the functions in the random module for modeling, simulations, games, sampling, etc. but use os.urandom, secrets, or random.SystemRandom for cryptographic applications. I know very little about cryptography and security, these are just my notes about stuff I recently learned.
It uses the Mersenne Twister algorithm, which is a pseudorandom number generator with a period of 2^19937-1. It is one of the most widely used PRNGs in the world, and suitable for many applications.
TL;DR: If you’re getting a weird looking Error: fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output error checking out a large repo on a GitHub Actions using a Windows Runner, try switching to use HTTPS instead of SSH for your clones (by providing a personal access token instead of an SSH key).
Summary I was recently working on getting CI setup for a project that has a pretty large repo with a few submodules and uses LFS for some large binaries.
Some tips for Working at a Smaller Company (mostly for devs) TL;DR - A small company can be a great place to learn, and it can be a lot easier to see the effects of the results of your work. At the same time, you likely won’t have access to the same structure, level of mentorship, clarity of career path / progression, or resources. In my experience you need to be the kind of person who (1) is happy with being more of a generalist, and (2) take responsibility for your own learning - eg fill in gaps were necessary, go deeper when needed, and lean on outside resources, friends, etc.
TL;DR - This is a simple React component that allows you to make multiple highlights in a text from user selections.
Why? Working on a side project I wanted a way for users (and me as the current only user) to save words that they don’t know from a text. I found this great example blog that demonstrated one way to do this in React, but it didn’t allow for multiple highlights.