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 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.

A breezy, slightly tongue‑in‑cheek look at why setting pointers to NULL right after free (and a few related memory‑management niceties) can save you from nasty use‑after‑free bugs, memory leaks, and the occasional midnight debugging panic.

A playful replay of Zalewski’s “Silence on the Wire” experiment: plotting 3‑D scattergrams of various RNGs (Python, shuf, urandom, online services) to see if any have secretly upgraded their magic. Spoiler: they all look suspiciously alike.

A breezy, tour of fast‑flux botnets, those sneaky DNS tricks that let malicious actors hop around like digital grasshoppers. We’ll peek at how dynamic DNS and round‑robin magic keep the bad guys’ command‑and‑control servers slippery, and glance at the cat‑and‑mouse game of detection (TTL tricks, activity indexes, and the occasional semantic sleuthing). Spoiler: it’s a wild ride, but the good news is there are ways to shine a flashlight on the flux.