"Darknet Diaries" podcast 🐱‍💻

"Darknet Diaries" is a podcast which you will struggle to put down. It is a narrative, documentary-style podcast about hackers, breaches, hacktivism and cybercrime. Each week, the host (Jack Rhysider) investigates a different hack or breach or DevSec vulnerability. Examples include: the infamous LinkedIn breach; the long-running PirateBay takedown; and the Puerto Rico lottery hack.

As a developer myself, I find each story a fascinating cautionary tale of what not to do. It is also a poignant reminder to always take DevSecOps seriously - to double-check and triple-check your deployments. Even experienced, diligent and well-meaning DevOps engineers can make innocent mistakes which allow access to malicious agents.

The LinkedIn breach exemplifies this best - an employee's personal hobby website hosted on a machine in his bedroom was the entry point hackers used to steal details of 100 million LinkedIn users.

This podcast is a must-listen for anyone in tech, DevOps and cyber security!

VS Code "Settings Sync" ⚙️

It is rare that a month goes by without me discovering a new and brilliant feature on VS Code - one that improves my developer experience (DX) and improves my productivity. I recently discovered the "Settings Sync" feature. Settings Sync lets you share your Visual Studio Code configurations such as settings, keybindings, and installed extensions across your machines so you are always working with your favourite setup.

Settings Sync proved particularly useful when I upgraded my OS (fresh install) and had to reinstall all my applications. With Settings Sync, I simply logged into VS Code, and enabled Settings Sync, and then all my settings and extensions synced locally! That easy!

Interestingly, Settings Sync itself started as a community-developed extension. However, Microsoft recognised its value and now builds it into VS Code by default. I think this demonstrates the high bar which is Microsoft's custodianship of VS Code.