I, Hamid Elaosta (Mastodon), (Twitter) am a Senior Software Engineer based in England. I was educated in Electronic Engineering, so I enjoy the odd electronics project, getting out the oscilloscope, or the soldering iron.

Professionally I spend my time writing software, with a focus on security. My language of choice these days is Golang, but I also spent the first half-decade of my career creating Android applications in Java, with the odd sprinkle of other platforms in C and C++ here and there.

I strongly believe in Open Source and Libre software; everything I finish goes on my Github (Note I keep a Github organisation for things related to this site; 2bytes Github), and I’m trying to encourage myself to release more of my work there even when I feel it’s not ready yet.

The goal with everything I publish here is to make it beginner friendly, I try hard to make sure everything is explained and cited where possible. If anything here isn’t easy enough to follow, I consider that a “bug” and ask that you raise a ticket in Github, I’ll do my best to improve it.

I use Linux as my (almost) only operating system (I use *BSD too), both at home and at work, I’m always happy to discuss my reasons for that, but for now I’ll just say that I first started tinkering with Linux based distros in my early teens, these days, decades later, I couldn’t imagine using anything else.

Privacy and security have been an important focus for me for some time, and I intend to blog more about that. Those ideals are constant throughout my work, from why I write code that supports self-issuing your TLS certificates, to why this blog contains no analytics or cookies, and certainly, with a passion, no adverts.