My name is Arjen and I am the Manager of Product Development and Chief Lecturer at Hogeschool NOVI. I work on creating the most modern and relevant educational products that we can offer. Through stategic partnerships and attracting the most talented content developers we offer world class education to our students.
In my work as Chief Lecturer for Cybersecurity I focus on teaching students all there is to know about the technical side of Cyber Security. My main areas of expertise are Reverse Engineering, Infrastructure Security and Web Application Security.
Next to my work I am active as an Independent Hacker. I assist my customers in their journey to increase their security posture. I do this through advice, seminars and security assessments. I toot on the fediverse as @credmp@fosstodon.org.
I organize the Dutch meetup for Hack The Box, for which I am the ambassador in The Netherlands. Each month, on the 3rd Wednesday, members of the Dutch cyber security community get together and have presentations, demos and discussion on wide ranging topics. Through this collaboration I have become an Ambassador for Hack The Box.
The views on this site are my own.
Using AI in academics
Using AI, in particular generative models such as GPT, are in contention within academics. The purity of academics resides in students writing on their research and having their work peer-reviewed. But how can you now be sure that the student wrote the paper and how can you trust its content? Many universities, including the OU have written about it. The OU published an article in Modulair about it. Generally, the consensus seems to be that it is ok to use AI as an assistant, but you must write your texts....
Starting my Master Thesis
Today, I took the first step towards starting my master’s thesis. I have decided to document my journey and experiences on my blog. Given that the thesis will play a pivotal role in my life for the next nine months, I expect it to be a thrilling journey. Finding a topic As a student at Open Universiteit in The Netherlands, I had the opportunity to work with the Rascal programming language during the Software Quality Management course....
Open Universiteit: Software Quality Management
Background I have been working on getting my Master’s degree in Software Engineering. To do this I have started following courses at the Dutch Open Universiteit. They have a Master’s program that takes 2 years and you are able to follow it from home. As this is my first post on the courses, I will give some background. As a teacher it is recommended to have a Master’s degree. As I had a whole lot of work experience my teaching activities were not a problem, but from an overall point of view I was advised to pursue an Master degree....
Badge Challenge 3
Original Post During each in-person Hack The Box meetup I have a small badge challenge that will give the first solver of the challenge a price. at the meetup of March 2023 there will be a very nice little challenge to be done as well, a beautiful NOVI hoodie. You can already download the password protected zip archive. The password will be shared during the meetup opening words. The zip archive (sha1: 28e84243c79caefce06f62ba2c5d930de37a3439) Good luck....
Deployment Anxiety
Let me tell you how it was to ship a product out to half a million people back in 1999. But before I do that, let me tell you why. Today I talked to one of my students and he mentioned that he was very nervous about a change he was making. He was afraid it would break things and that he would spend the afternoon working through his CI/CD pipeline to resolve issues....
Cleaning up after LSP-mode
I use lsp-mode quite extensively. I switched from eglot when I started using LSP more. The beautify of lsp-mode is that it will automatically install language servers as you need them. It also integrates excellently with dap-mode to enable debugging sessions. So, I switched to it, turned off all the information overload and I am quite happy. One thing I do extensively is that I use LaTeX to make my slides for college class slides and class assignments....
Should we pay for open source?
As the world is processing the Twitter deal the open source project Mastodon is gaining a lot of traction. The instance that I am on, fosstodon, is run by a small team and is fully funded by donations. Now this may sound somewhat strange; as the twitterverse is blowing up about $8/month for a blue checkmark I would argue that the $8 is better spent supporting open source projects. As developers, security people, and users we rely on a lot of free time and effort from open source contributors....
22 years of Emacs
Where to begin… I just watched David Wilson’s talk called M-x forever - why Emacs will outlast text editor trends. He gave this talk at EmacsConf 2021 which is a conference dedicated to Emacs. The talk made me reflect on my use of Emacs over the last years and then I realized that this year will mark 22 years that Emacs and I have been together. This (probably too long) article reflects on those years and dives into my use of Emacs....
Hack The Box Ambassador
For the last 18 months I have organized the dutch Hack The Box meetups. Due to COVID-19 they have all been as a digital meetup, but not less entertaining though. During my time organizing the meetups the Hack The Box organization supports me in various ways; they give me stuff to hand out such as swag or VIP memberships, they help organize speakers for events when we don’t have one ourselves and they provide me with Hack The Box goodies every once in a while....