Hey, I'm Oscar!

A TLS Handshake hidden mechanism confused everybody so much and I found out why. I just spent last week in Tunis, Tunisia 🇹🇳, helping a government organisation understand and troubleshoot a network/connectivity issue for what was described as “a faulty HTTPS connection”. I got to work closely with SSL/TLS (openssl), certificate chains and ultimately, made me understand a bit better the role of certificate authority. But what was quite surprising to me was that I got to learn a piece of magic inside the TLS handshake ...

So I’m making this post as a promise I made to me (and several other people) so I wouldn’t forget how much this process was an emotional rollercoaster for me. Also it’s been exactly 12 months since I started tl:dr; I finally got my European (Belgian) driving licence after exactly 1 year of effort. Scroll to the bottom to see the list of steps I had to take To begin with, I would like to mention a couple of things: ...

If you’re asking, yes I use claude code and yes I’ve used it for my actual professional paid work. And no nothing has broken beyond repair. I started exploring AI/LLM use for software engineering and programming tasks about a year ago, and as a data privacy paranoid, I still remember the immense feeling of risk I experienced. I mean… existentially… you were surrendering your data, your code, your intellectual property to a massive statistical machine that would use it to get fed, become bigger and thus perpetuate itself. ...

NOTE: I know the cover image has nothing to do with this post, I just found it in my photos and thought it was pretty One thing I wanted to document somewhere is a finding I just while I was working on a project. I’ve been building a Kubernetes cluster using AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), with the fantastic terraform-aws-modules Here’s the example I’m using (trimmed for brevity) module "eks" { source = "terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws" version = "~> 21.0" kubernetes_version = "1.34" ... addons = { vpc-cni = { before_compute = true } } ... } Problem I am deploying things but Pods get stuck in Pending with the note “Too many pods 0/N nodes are available”. I checked and have sufficient memory and cpu resources to allocate them. ...

A little more than two years ago, I started experiencing a very unique feeling, the sort of complex emotion that’s hard to put into words, but that I’d describe as a “bittersweet, existential, anxiety-inducing nostalgia.” I’m not quite sure how else to put it, and I’m writing this as a way to see if putting it into words can help me clarify it in a more structured form. Many days, I’d go to sleep and wake up feeling this bizarre mixture of happiness and melancholy. ...