This is the second half of a post about using Nix to automate a fuzz testing workflow.

At this point, I can run honggfuzz against pdftotext, but it takes a bit of manual effort to get things started. I promised in part one that I’d get all of the installation and fuzzing down to a single command.

Downloading tricky PDFs

In my ad-hoc fuzzing, I manually downloaded a PDF from the IRS website. I’ll start by automating that step.

Last week, I saw an interesting article on the /r/legaladvice subreddit. An e-commerce business owner was complaining that a customer was suing because the merchant had been sending the customer promotional emails for years that the customer never agreed to. The author deleted the post a few days later, but I found a copy of the text.

The merchant was indignant and felt like it was a shakedown, but I was 100% on the customer’s side. The merchant is in the wrong for spamming their customers with promotional emails they never requested, and so the merchant should suffer financial repercussions.

Highlights

• I’m finding it surprisingly difficult not to work.
• Sleep is getting a little better.
• I used Nix to create a slick and reusable fuzz testing workflow.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Enjoy family time

• Result: Spent lots of time with my wife and our newborn son and had frequent visits with friends and family.
• Grade: A

I’ll be okay if I don’t work for a bit

I never thought of myself as someone who needs to work all the time, but I’m finding it difficult to take time off.

Highlights

• My wife and I became parents.
• I realized that caring for a newborn takes more time than I expected.
• I’m unsure what to do with my partially-finished Hacker News course.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Finish recording my course

• Result: Baby arrived early, and I only recorded 20% of the material.
• Grade: N/A

Recording the course took longer than I thought, and the baby arrived a few weeks earlier than we expected, so I didn’t get to all the material.

A year ago, I listened to an interview with Jesse Pollak on an episode of Into the Bytecode.

Jesse works for Coinbase, and he noticed that lots of developers building apps on top of Ethereum were solving the same problems over and over again. He started a project at Coinbase to create a layer on top of Etherum called Base. Base would get Ethereum developers up and running faster because they could use shared solutions to these common problems.