Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Migrating my hugo blog from Gitlab/AWS S3 to Github Pages with Actions

Shantanu Goel

Until Now - The State of the union

This blog is generated using hugo, an awesome static site generator. So far, the workflow I used to deploy it was:

  • Push commit to the source repository on GitLab
  • GitLab CI kicks off on receiving the push
    • CI downloads latest version of hugo and generates the static site
    • Runs aws-cli to sync the new files to AWS S3
  • S3 serves the static site
  • Cloudflare provides:
    • DNS services (so I can use https://shantanugoel.com without having to prefix it with a www)
    • CDN/Caching services for resilience and keeping S3 bills low for data transfer

Why? What broke the camel’s back

I was mostly happy with this setup with a couple of niggles at the back of my mind, vis. a vis.:

Integrating SDL2 with bazel on macOS

Bazel

Came across bazel build system recently at my new job and found it to be quite nice compared to my earlier mainstays CMake and Make. It’s fast and correct, just as their website says. But I also liked it because it’s explicit with very little magic. And it has a powerful query/tools system that allows you to really analyze your builds and dependencies in depth. Though examples in the wild are a bit less since it is a fairly recent entrant compared to its competitors. For a personal side project, I needed to use SDL2 and it was the first time I had to use an external/pre-built library with bazel. This post documents the process I used for my own future reference and may be help some other lost soul like me. Although, the post talks about SDL2 here specifically, the same process can be used for most other external pre-compiled modules.

Practical Reverse Engineering Tutorials Part 2: Protostar Stack4

Shantanu Goel

About the challenge

In this article, we’ll go through the Protostar stack4 challenge. This would be a bit similar to the stack0 challenge that we already tackled earlier, but it will think about an interesting way to get alternate code to execute instead of just modifying data.

Pre-requisite: Make sure you’ve completed the Part 1 of the Practical Reverse Engineering Tutorials series. It’d also be great if you can try stack1-stack3 challenges on your own as they are similar to stack0.

Practical Reverse Engineering Tutorials Part 1: Introduction & Protostar Stack 0

Shantanu Goel

What is this about?

This article is the 1st part of the Practical Reverse Engineering Tutorials series. This series is geared towards a structured, but almost completely practical, approach to learn Reverse Engineering. Many of the existing articles/books take a long winded approach to teach RE which is prefixed with a lot of theory before the reader can get their hands dirty. This series will take a different approach of picking up various challenges in the order of increasing difficulty and help the reader in exploring ways how to break them. I’ll try to keep mundane theory limited to the portions needed to beat the current challenge in consideration. Hopefully, this keeps the articles short, precise and interesting enough for readers to keep their attention span intact.

Create a bit.ly like shorturl static website

Shantanu Goel

I decided to create my own shorturl website last week for personal use and ended up developing a python project (deecubes)that can be used by anyone to do the same. This is a post to explain what/why/how about it.

Why my own shorturl website?

So far I had been using sites like bit.ly or TinyURL whenever I needed to generate a shorturl (e.g. for giving to someone for easily remember, noting down on paper, putting links on resume, etc) but I had concerns that: