Adam Caudill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why I Will Never Write With AI

Every person has rules that they apply to themself, red lines that they won’t cross. For me, signing my name to anything generated by AI is one of those. I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about why.

I spend a lot of time writing. Some is on this site, though much more of my work isn’t public, is published elsewhere, not yet published, or ghost written for others. On this site, according to the stats, I’ve spent at least 864 hours writing the content you see here. That’s over a month of continuous writing. That’s over a month of my life dedicated to sharing information and working to prompt further discussion and contemplation. Yet I never have, nor ever will, sign my name to anything written with AI¹.

25% Unemployment in Tech?

A look at the Tech Industry, Economy, & Unemployment

For more than a year there has been a clear trend: unemployment in the tech industry was climbing. The number of people with an #OpenToWork badge on their picture was climbing. There was something worse though, something that I hadn’t seen before: several months later, they were still looking. Something was wrong. Something had changed.

There are incredibly talented people with years or even decades of experience that are finding themselves spending anywhere from 9 to 24+ months to find new employment. People that are well established in their careers, people that have proven themselves, yet unable to find stable employment. People that just a few years ago would have had several offers within weeks, now unable to find even one after many months.