My blog

Welcome to my blog category, where I ramble on about random topics that I find in my day to day. Most of these are programming related, but there could be other topics within the listing.

Articles

Setting up Wireguard

Dated: July 25, 2022
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, devops and wireguard

It is time to learn something new again, his time it is the VPN solution Wireguard

Internals

Wireguard is based around a TUN network interface. This network interface has multiple properties:

#wg show wg0
interface: wg0
  public key: jyhyusgqxdzT732wlJa7nQCMqUvQnpC//SUjCBAsniI=
  private key: (hidden)
  listening port: 47761
  fwmark: 0xca6c

peer: WjzcgNo1uYO0KoThtCz6ecgA2a33HJ5Lu5ZBHpIXIDw=
  preshared key: (hidden)
  endpoint: server.example.com:65
  allowed ips: 0.0.0.0/0, ::/0

The…

Exploring the details html element

Dated: April 9, 2022
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, exploring, html and under-used

One of the underused HTML elements is the <details> element. For the uses cases this tag gives you, it is not used enough on websites.

Lets explore its uses together. This tag is used to make an expanding/collapsing detail/summary view. The browser then adds interaction to the element, allowing the user to open/close the element itself. Lets take a look at a basic example:

<details>
    <summary>This is the summary</summary>
    <p>This is the body</p>
    <p>Multiple tags are allowed here</p>
</details>

Writing your own webpack loader

Dated: March 25, 2022
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, tech-demo, webpack, loader and from-scratch

Webpack looks like a quite intimidating system, but having played around with them, they are very simple. In this article we will be creating our own loader from scratch and adding them to our webpack configuration.

Basics of a loader

The core concept is a loader is basically a function that maps input to output. Loaders have the requirement is being written in the commonjs format, meaning you work with module.exports and require. An basic example:

module.exports = function stringReplacingLoader(input) {
    return input.replace("World", "Earth");
}

React bare bones setup

Dated: March 23, 2022
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, tech-demo, react, webpack, bare-bones and from-scratch

When you start with React, it is common that you just start a project with the CRA tool. While this quickly makes a project, it also does lots of magic in the background to make it work. For learning purposes, it can be better to write your own configuration to build a react application.

Very simple setup

It is possible to use the ReactJS framework without using any transpilers. For this, make a new directory for our project and make a index.html file containing the following content:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>My React app</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <script src="react.development.js"></script>
        <script type="module" src="/main.js"></script>
    </body>
</html>

My new website

Dated: March 15, 2022
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, portfolio, skills, loader and jsx

If you read this quickly after publication, the chance is high you are on my newly build website. There are multiple techniques used on this website to archive my goals. Doing this mix with a static website vs easy to add content was quite the technical challenge, but looking at this website shows I succeeded in my goals.

Goals

Static HTML pages
Minimal javascript
Automatic compiling of markdown posts
Dark/white theme support based on the browser, with user override
Quick load times
Contribution…

How I found a TypeScript public playground XSS exploit

Dated: January 11, 2022
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, security, xss and typescript

In 2021, I was playing around with the online TypeScript sandbox, when I discovered a weird issue. When trying to write XML to the terminal, it instead of showing me the string representation, it was actually executing it.

While it makes sense for a code sandbox to execute the code you input, it is important it stays within the sandbox, as the sandbox has the proper restrictions put on the javascript environment, which includes blocking cookie access and fetch access at a minium.

The exploit

The…

Making a backup of your GitHub repositories

Dated: August 2, 2017
This article has been posted under the following categories: blog, backup and github

When working with GitHub, you have the advantage that everything is stored in the cloud. While this is fine for most people, it can be useful to make a local backup in the case you expect to have no internet for a certain period of time, like a vacation.

Results of the mirror (image)

Initial backup tool

Lucky for us, git already has the features build in to effectively mirror a remote repository using the mirror flag, so the only thing left for us, is getting a list of repositories to clone.

This…