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The personal website of Phil MassynΒΆ

Zero Trust for Applications

The Zero Trust methodology has been around for a while, and many organisations have been implementing Zero Trust principles. When considering applications deployed in an enterprise, organisations typically implement zero trust at the infrastructure layer, protecting access to and from applications and securing network communications.

Infrastructure-level protection is essential, but there's another threat vector: the application itself. While SDLC processes and security tools help secure code, there's an opportunity to implement Zero Trust principles directly within applications.

Reporting Tools Overview

As a Cyber specialist, I have had to develop quite a few security dashboards over the years. This has lead me down a path of data engineering, combining my expertise in Cyber engineering with data. While working with different reporting tools, I have come to know some of them quite well, and in this blog post, I will share some of my thoughts on the different tools, and give you a bit of insight to which one to choose for your next project.

HOWTO: Host your own reporting platform on AWS

Metabase and Grafana are both quite capable reporting platforms. Both vendors offer you the ability to run the software for free on your own infrastructure, so it's quite an attractive option for companies who would like to have some business intelligence capability without breaking the bank. In this guide, I will show you how can use the Cloudformation template to deploy these reporting tools on your aws environment.

Security is not Compliance

Some companies like to combine their Security and Compliance teams into one entity. I've worked in environments like that before, and I can tell you from experience that it is usually a bad idea to mix the two. Let's dig into it.

  • in ai, coding
  • 7 min read

Coding with AI

Tools like ChatGPT have been a game changer in a lot of industries. There is a fear floating that AI will replace programmers, displacing more jobs. Over the past year I have been using these tools in my own coding journey, and I learned a few things along the way.

The Art of Troubleshooting

As technicians, we often have to solve some difficult problems. I've had my fair share of whoppers, were I thought the world is coming crashing down. After a while, I started learning a process for dealing with technical problems.

  • in python
  • 8 min read

Generate documents with Jinja2 in Python

There are cases where you record data in a number of data sources, and then need to generate documentation from that data. One case I get involved in from time-to-time is to generate documentation from data collected in various data sources. Rather than copying-and-pasting, we can use code to dynmically generate documentation. In this post, I will show you some examples in how we can use jinja2 to generate markdown in Python.