Posts

Background What is Terraform Terraform shifts infrastructure management away from manual console operations and toward declarative configuration (HCL, the HashiCorp Configuration Language). Management workflow (plan and apply) Plan: Terraform compares the desired configuration with the current reality (state) and produces an execution plan (create/modify/delete) for review. Apply: Terraform executes the approved plan to move infrastructure from the current state to the desired state. Provider ecosystem Providers make Terraform flexible: they allow a consistent workflow across different APIs and environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.). ...

I recently chased down a write-heavy performance regression that showed up when running the same workload on MongoDB 4.2.1 versus MongoDB 4.0.13. The punchline: the “slow” version spent a surprising amount of CPU time rebuilding WiredTiger row-store keys during eviction-driven reconciliation. With a targeted fix to key handling, the regression disappeared. This post walks through the debugging approach end-to-end: how I reproduced the issue, what the flamegraphs revealed, how I used gdb to confirm the execution path, and why the root cause points to a specific key-buffer reset. ...

I recently tackled the Water Treatment reverse engineering challenge from the CyberSCI Regionals 2025-26. The challenge involves a legacy 16-bit MS-DOS executable (wt.exe) and consists of three flags. I managed to solve the first flag during the hackathon and the second one afterwards. This post details how I cracked the password to get access to the menu page. Here is how I went from raw assembly to a successful crack using Ghidra and Python. ...