Camino Primitivo

 I got feedback from people saying my previous posts inspired them to either lose weight, start exercising, run a half marathon with their sibling or consider doing the Camino. So one more post hoping it also serves as inspiration for someone. If it does, please let me know! 

 My active holidays comes to an end and, for the third year running, I have been doing some walking, this time along the Camino Primitivo. In fact, well over 500k steps in eleven days to cover the distance between Oviedo and Santiago, a superb and challenging experience with plenty of time to walk on my own for hours and also to meet some great fellow pilgrims. If that was not enough, it was made all the more "interesting" by the mix of rain, wind and scorching temperatures I got the pleasure to enjoy throughout the days. 

 One word of caution though, consider your fitness level and rather start small. It's taken me a couple of years to get to a point where I feel I can walk 30km per day on average up and down through rough terrain (and to be fair, my feet probably beg to differ). Training can get you anywhere but it takes time. 

 And while we are on the topic of walking, my department, Digital & IT, has organised a step challenge called Steptember, raising money for Children's Cancer Research Fund. Any donations, big or small, are highly appreciated. 

Rolls Royce Digital and IT is fundraising for Children's Cancer Research Fund

This was posted in LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/p/eqRVsqxa

The world wins with happy developers

I just spent the last couple of days at the We Are Developers World Conference in Berlin with my team. Not surprisingly agentic AI was a big topic especially how the software development life cycle is being redefined along with the job of software development itself, what is worth measuring and what is not, and how different companies are tackling similar challenges.

My aim in this conference was not to gather technical details, but rather to look for inspiration to become a better manager, therefore several of the talks I decided to attend were about creating high performance teams, removing friction and improving developer experience. Time well spent.

Plus there is the possibility to watch all other talks online. In that sense, zero FOMO during the conference knowing everything will be available. Kudos to the organisers.

First published in LinkedIn

Capture The Flag (CTF)

Last month I participated in a CTF event organised by the RR team in Indy through this platform, CyLab Security Academy. The challenges covered several categories and were organised in 6 levels, each level only made available if you solve at least 50% of the challenges in the previous level. While some challenges I could solve in a few minutes, others took much much longer. In fact I got stuck for days in a reverse engineering one. I ended up learning a fair bit about assembly and radare2 through The Official Radare2 Book and eventually cracked the challenge. However I ran out of time and could only complete one more challenge before the deadline. All in all, great experience. I decided to go solo instead of teaming up with someone else and managed to finish in the top 10th percentile of participants (~13th percentile of people who at least solved one challenge). Nothing like jumping into a new topic to see how many things you don't know...