Adam Caudill

• Five Years with Hugo

  A look back at 5 years of experience publishing with Hugo.

  During a break over Christmas 2020, I rebuilt this site, moving from WordPress to Hugo. After more than 5 years of publishing with Hugo, I’d like to share what I’ve learned, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and why for once, I’m happy with the platform I’m using.

  This review builds on two recent articles, Five Hundred, a retrospective of 500 posts to this site, and ‌Lessons Learned from 20 Years & Why You Should Blog, a look back at 20 years of publishing here, and the value of writing & blogging more generally. In this post, I will be diving into publishing with Hugo specifically, what’s good, what’s not, and what you should think about if you are considering it.

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• AI & IAM: Focus on Fundamentals

  On the need to address fundamental issues when integrating new technologies.

  A recent article, The Future of Cybersecurity Includes Non-Human Employees¹, discussed the growing need to manage access granted to the rapidly expanding number of AI agents being deployed in companies. This is a deeply important topic, and particularly timely, as many are facing this challenge today. While I do want to address that topic, I also want to address how this is being framed.

  Aside from leaning into an inflammatory tone with the use of “Non-Human Employees” as part of the title of the piece, there’s a deeper issue I see with how this is being framed, and it’s also related to AI. Importantly, this is far from unique to this article, but a trend across discussions of AI (and other new & emerging technologies). For the pragmatic security practitioner, a clear understanding of this framing device and the danger of accepting it unchallenged is of particular import.

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• On Privacy Nihilism

  On the feeling of futility and the importance of action.

  Amongst the steady stream of marketing emails for gift cards and other last minute gifts in the days before Christmas, buried in the noise sent when people are least likely to see it, was a notice. It was an all-too-familiar “we take your privacy seriously, but” email. Perfectly timed to make it clear that privacy wasn’t that important.

  This wasn’t just my email address being leaked, this was everything. Name, address, income, employer, social security number. Each record stolen was essentially an identity theft kit; everything needed in one place. From a privacy and data security perspective, few things are worse.

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• Dynamic Social Media Images for Hugo

  I’m a big fan of Hugo as a publishing platform, it’s the framework behind this site, and is incredibly flexible - if you are willing to invest the time and effort to make it truly yours. It’s fast, versatile, and has robust theming support. However, it’s also a static site generator, so doing anything dynamic means doing some extra work (as you have to do it at build time).

  My life philosophy can be summed up to “work hard to be lazy” - in this case, that means I want a solution for social media sharing (OpenGraph) images that I will work without me needing to think about them again. This way, when a link is shared to Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, or other platforms, a reasonable image will be shown - even if I didn’t include an image for the article.

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• Lessons Learned from 20 Years & Why You Should Blog

  Hard-won lessons from two decades of blogging, and why you should start your own.

  Twenty years ago, I started publishing articles and essays here, and I recently published the 500th post to this site. After writing 267,897 words here and investing 2,100 hours into this site, I’ve learned a few things, made some mistakes, and I’d like to share some of these insights with you. Whether you are a veteran of the blogosphere or questioning if you should dip your toes in the waters (you should), I think you will find some useful information here.

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• Five Hundred

  The 500th post: a look back, and a look ahead.

  The year was 2006 when I registered adamcaudill.com and set up WordPress to host this site. I had recently moved, started a new job as a software developer, and I wanted a new place to share thoughts, code, and the insight I was gathering along the way. I made the very first post.

  It will be 20 years, next month, since that first post, a short note from someone still finding his legs in the industry and far from finding his legs as a writer. Through the 2000s, the average length of the posts was only 240 words. Far from the long-windedness common in my more recent work.

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• Whose Monkeys Are These?

  The 'Somebody Else's Problem' Problem in Leadership

  Over the course of my career, I’ve found that there are some principles that are key for people and teams to be effective. One of these is that everything should have an owner. Everything should have someone that is responsible. Everything should have a designated person whose job it is to care about it. This might a be bug or vulnerability reports in software, it could be routine processes, or who responds to certain emails.

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• Is Long-form Writing Dead?

  In a world where attention spans have been reduced to seconds, college students aren’t expected to read full books, AI is used to summarise anything more than a few sentences, and blogs have been largely replaced with microblogging platforms, is there still a place for long-form writing? In this essay I would like to explore that question; from how we got here to what hope we have for the future.

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