Business ⁽⁵⁾

My company offered an experimental bug bounty program for a few months during 2024 as a trial with three goals: A) engage with the infosec community, B) assess the effort and cost required to support a bug bounty program, and C) improve the security of our systems. Twomile is a small company with a small staff, funded 100% by customers. We do not have venture capital money or Big Company money to devote to experimental programs. While the bug bounty…

Every time I set up a new laptop for myself or an employee, I go through a brief "Windows or Linux?" tradeoff analysis. It's never an easy choice. All of our development work is platform-independent, using broadly available open-source tools like java, node, postgresql, QGIS. Everything that's deployed to a server is Linux (usually Ubunutu). On the other hand, the US business world runs almost exclusively on Microsoft. For compatibility sake, Windows is my daily driver so that I can…

There's a common pattern underpinning technology hype cycles, that is basically a bunch of large companies saying "New Shiny Thing will reduce our costs and improve customer experience!" People get very excited about some new and compelling technology then everybody scrambles to figure out how to align it with their business. At the moment, it's "AI" or more specifically a small subset of Artificial Intelligence called Large Language Models (LLMs) which do a very good job of sounding like people…

Cleveland civic leaders are gaga for blockchain right now. Organizations are pulling together in an uncharacteristic way, in support of Bernie Moreno's moonshot "Blockland". This week, Noriel Roubini's delivered well-researched statements for the Senate banking committee, on why cryptocurrency is a scam ("the mother or father of all scams and bubbles"), and blockchain is massively overhyped ("In practice it is nothing better than a glorified spreadsheet or database"). Roubini is a professor at NYU, studies asset and credit bubbles, and…

You're fresh out of college or code school, and you want to market your tech skills. How exactly do you get those first gigs? Here are some tips based on my experience in the field. Be honest about your capabilities. Some people will say "fake it till you make it" but that doesn't work for me and I'm no good at it anyway. I'd rather work with someone who knows their limitations than someone who thinks they know everything, and…