Notes from the field

Engineering, security writeups, and the occasional rant. Updated whenever I have something worth saying.

11 May 20262 min read
Hello from the new site
A short note on rebuilding dev-aidan.com from scratch — what changed, what didn't, and why I'm off AWS.
metanextjsvercel
9 May 20262 min readinfo
Getting comfortable with Burp Suite
A practical first-week-with-Burp post — what to set up, what to ignore, and how I'm building a workflow.
securityburpweb
8 May 20262 min read
Why I left AWS for a personal site
An honest, slightly sheepish accounting of paying for infrastructure I didn't need, and what I switched to.
awsvercelinfra
28 June 20256 min read
Deploy a Next.js portfolio to AWS in 10 minutes with SST v3
From an empty folder to a live Next.js portfolio on AWS with HTTPS, a global CDN, and automatic deployments — no CloudFormation, no console clicking, no drama.
sstawsnextjs
28 June 20255 min readinfo
Masking Shellcode with IPv4
A technique for slipping shellcode past Windows Defender by encoding the bytes as IPv4 address strings — and how to put it back together at runtime.
securityshellcodeipv4