Posts on netflux.io

Your .env files are under attack

Tue, 05 May 2026 19:01:23 +0200

Unencrypted secrets on developer workstations and long-lived credentials in continuous integration environments have long been considered bad practice. But they have often been tolerated because the cost of avoiding them was perceived as higher than the cost of leaving them - for most projects, most of the time. That calculation has changed. The rise of AI agents has opened new paths for local secrets to leak, and every step of the software development lifecycle is being actively targeted by a sustained campaign of supply chain attacks. Rigorous secrets management is now a foundational part of every project.

FOSDEM 2026

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:20:00 +0100

This weekend I attended the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. FOSDEM is a conference for all things free and open source software. It was my first time attending, and I enjoyed it immensely. While it’s fresh in my mind, here are a few notes and learnings.

I had only passed briefly through Brussels before and did not know what to expect from the city. For the record, I spent most of my time between Schaerbeek, where I stayed, and the site of FOSDEM in Solbosch. It turns out that the city, or at least the parts that I saw, is clean, modern and vibrant. There is history everywhere, but it’s also obvious that a ton of investment has been dropped on the city over recent years. On every turn there is the contrast of old and new, bricks and steel girders, and privilege and struggle. In this way, for better and worse, it reminded me strongly of London - more so than any other city I have visited, in fact. I found the overall effect exhilarating and would definitely return to explore more meaningfully.

Handy tracing tools with eBPF

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 14:36:07 +0100

eBPF allows event-driven programs, written in high-level languages, to be configured to run against pre-defined hooks such as syscalls, function invocations, and network events. The technology enables the creation of user-space implementations of many tools which previously required a kernel implementation or module.

While researching the technology and scoping out potentially interesting use-cases, I’ve discovered that eBPF ships with a collection of simple but useful tracing tools. I suspect that I’ll be reaching for these frequently in the future — especially for those tricky bugs where more traditional debugging techniques fail to deliver.

Hello World

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 11:23:59 +0100

Hello, world.

Here we go with another attempt to start a blog. I hope to make this a place where I routinely share my learnings and discoveries, in the hope they’re useful to somebody. Perhaps this time, I will manage to maintain it for more than a handful of posts.

Let the blogging commence!