Tim McCormack
Welcome! I'm Tim McCormack, a software developer, father, hacker, and nature enthusiast living in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA.
Navigation
- Blog, mostly on tech and infosec these days, but sometimes about plants or DIY stuff
- Contact information
About me
I enjoy reading up on and exploring software design and development, biology, math, philosophy, psychology, computer science, information security, and interaction design. Besides the academic fields, I also enjoy climbing, hacking, hiking, biking, photography, and breaking things open to see what makes them tick.
I currently work for an online education company as a software developer writing Python on an architecture-focused team, although in previous positions I was mostly working in JVM languages (Clojure, Java, Kotlin, Groovy) or in browser-side development (HTML, CSS, Javascript). At home, I now mostly use Rust. I also moonlight in infosec, especially web and application security. I have various side projects such as a photo gallery written in Rust, and a social media project with a reference implementation in Kotlin.
About this site
The domain name Brain on Fire is a reference to those rare moments of enlightenment and insight when I feel that I have unlocked some mystery of the world or broken through to a new level of understanding. It doesn't have to be an original idea; perhaps I've just come across a new way of communicating something.
...this doesn't happen often, but some of these moments turned into blog posts, and I wanted to share them. (Most of the blog posts don't live up to that standard, of course; the name is largely aspirational.)
Blogroll
I'm just incrementally adding stuff from my feed reader to here; it's not particularly well-organized yet.
Personal blogs (tech)
Predictably, most of the blogs I follow are tech-related.
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Waldo Jaquith:
Technology, Virginia and US politics, open government
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Aldo Cortesi:
Infosec and software
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Cybergibbons: Infosec:
Reverse engineering, hardware, alarm systems
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Dan Luu:
"A blog about programming; ¾ technical content, ¼ musings about the industry"
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fuzzy notepad:
Software and related topics (mostly web, game dev)
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Chromakode:
Software, design, life
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discrete blogarithm:
"the personal blog of yan/@bcrypt" - infosec etc.
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Writing (Rachel by the Bay):
"Software, technology, sysadmin war stories, and more."
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lcamtuf's blog:
Life, infosec, software
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Aral Balkan:
Privacy and ethical design
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cemerick:
Software, society
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Zenhack:
About code
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Matthew Garrett:
Infosec, both hardware and software
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Prosthetic Conscience (Jason F. McBrayer):
Social media, sysadminning, life
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Technomancy (Phil Hagelberg):
Software development, particularly Lua and Clojure
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Audrey Eschright:
Writer, community organizer, and software developer
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Dave Rupert
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Read the Tea Leaves:
Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson
Tech/legal
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/dev/lawyer:
Kyle E. Mitchell on law, technology, and the space between
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Copyleft Currents:
Heather Meeker on open source software licensing
Personal (other)
Some also have tech stuff, but it's not the main reason I follow them.
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Idiot Joy Showland:
Sarcastic political commentary (mostly UK)
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Things of Interest (qntm):
Software and fiction
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Editor: Myself: [defunct?]
Hossein Derakhshan's take on life — after 6 years of social coma
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A Working Library:
"Reading and writing from Mandy Brown"
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Idle Words:
Life (often very funny), software (also funny)
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Patterns in the Void:
Cryptography, anarchy, travel
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Shtetl-Optimized:
Quantum computing, politics
Companies (tech blogs)
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Netflix Techblog:
Scalable software, open source announcements, methodology
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Detectify:
Web security blog