A light‑hearted deep‑dive into architectural prerequisites—communication, class skeletons, data design, UI separation, and error/log handling. Think of it as laying a solid blueprint before the code construction crew arrives, because a wobbly foundation makes for a lot of late‑night debugging (and security headaches).

A breezy, slightly tongue‑in‑cheek look at why solid planning isn’t just good housekeeping—it’s a frontline defense. We walk through OWASP’s Insecure Design warning, compare personal versus mission‑critical projects, and tease out iterative vs. sequential approaches, all with a sprinkle of humor to keep the security talk from feeling like a lecture.

A light‑hearted look at Steve McConnell’s “Code Complete” metaphors—Penmanship, Farming, and Oyster Farming—and how each style can make your code more or less secure. Think of Penmanship as scribbling a quick note (great for tiny scripts, terrible for big projects), Farming as planting seeds with a bit of watering (testing each piece, but still lacking a master plan), and Oyster Farming as building a sturdy oyster bed (design first, then grow securely). Spoiler: the oyster wins the security contest.

A breezy guide to keeping file operations safe: validate paths, lock down permissions, and never let a privileged process wander into a user’s temp folder.

A light‑hearted dive into RFC 7030 (EST) as a smarter alternative to hard‑coded, pinned certificates. By letting clients fetch fresh TLS certs via a public‑key‑authenticated EST server, you dodge the nightly release‑cycle nightmare, gain easy revocation, and keep the private key out of the binary—plus a dash of extra work for the user that’s worth the security payoff.