Kyle Redelinghuys

For a while I have been looking for a simple service monitoring tool that didn’t cost anything to run and gave me what I wanted to know: when services are in trouble. Everything I found was either too complicated or partially filled what I was looking for. So I decided to quickly write something up and created go-monitor. TL;DR go-monitor is a simple service monitoring tool. Its primary function is to monitor a list of services specified by the user, and then to notify one or many users if/when these services go down. »

A big focus of the past two weeks has been on the banking project, if for nothing else than to keep momentum. As it turns out, keeping momentum has led to continued and valuable development. Bank project There are two things happening on the banking project right now. The first is tightening up the project and working around the unknowns, which at this stage are the integration. I’ve relegated those to the endpoints so other development can take place. »

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on cryptography lately. Some of my goals require a deep knowledge of encryption and how to implement successfully, so diving in now is an ideal time. One of the first updates I decided to do, in order to strengthen the banking project, was to update the password storage. I took a lead from the OWASP guidelines: Use a unique salt per password Have a sane, long minimum for password length Use an expensive cryptography function for hash calculation Argon2 At the top of the list of recommended hashing functions was Argon2. »

I’ve always been a fan of the free and open web. The practically zero barrier to entry It’s the biggest reason I could get into web development, and I use free and open source software (FOSS) wherever I can. This past weekend I took a look through some of the talks from the Distributed Web Summit. Some of the greatest minds gathered to try and fix the problem of centralisation that the open web is currently facing. »

After a fair period of doing research into the industry and various technical considerations, development work on the banking project has started once more. On the to-do list for some time now was push notifications. This is an interesting one as it affects both the server and the client and both are closely tied together. Backend structure I decided to add a separate table for the token storage. This table links tokens to an account, holds the token value, and also holds the platform the token is for. »

Over the past two weeks I’ve delved deeper into the banking project, played around with electronics and gone trail running. dayJob is returning to some normalcy and I’m liking it. Having a routine when there is a distributed team is super important, and after setting out a guide we are finally back on a decent track. Really looking forward to tackling some of the harder problems. Banking project I’ve spent a lot of time looking into two things reagrding the banking project: »

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The banking project has turned a corner. Status The development of the last eight months has led to a barebones functional banking core with a REST and CLI API and mobile application. With a few rewrites under the belt tests have been written, error handling has been implemented, and benchmarks have been included. The mobile application has been written in a few languages with the final choice being React. »

Once again, I am back to the weekly updates. Getting into a routine really helps with everything, and being settled adds to the routine. All men by nature desire knowledge Security I’ve fallen back in love with security. My involvement in the security industry through my formal employment has been great, but has not touched on the security aspects I’ve loved for years. Over the past week, I decided to set up a VPN to a server I have to make sure communication is secure. »

It’s been a long while since I’ve last posted anything. This has been due mainly to me moving countries, so is at least more understandable. Since the last update, a number of things have happened with the largest and most interesting having to do with moving countries (and everything associated with that), banking discoveries, banking interest, and settling down. Moving countries By far the most time and energy consuming exercise has been moving countries. »