QUENTIN MAYO / FIELD NOTES

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Our Server Got a Second Job: The Fourth of July Cryptominer

Even a security engineer can get pwned. How we traced a cryptominer consuming 12.5 CPU cores to a vulnerable Next.js app—and what the incident taught us about patching,…

11 min read

AI Created My Security Backlog. Then AI Fixed It.

AI helped me build more software—and accumulate nearly 1,000 security findings. Then I put agents to work on the backlog. Here’s what I learned about remediation, independent verification,…

15 min read

You Probably Don’t Need the Cloud Yet

I have a love-hate relationship with cloud computing. Let me start by making something clear: I’m not anti-cloud. AWS is actually my default cloud provider. I use Route…

8 min read

Where Should the Compute Live? Lessons From 100+ Hours of AI-Assisted Development

This isn’t one of those posts where I’m going to tell you that I’ve figured out the perfect development environment. I haven’t. There isn’t even necessarily a winner…

13 min read

How to Insert the Date with a Keyboard Shortcut on a Mac

I type the date often enough that copying and pasting it every time became a nuisance. My preferred format is the compact, sortable ISO format: 2026-08-09 On a…

3 min read

Setting up Safe-Settings on Coolify

A step-by-step guide to deploying GitHub Safe-Settings — policy-as-code for a GitHub organization — on a self-hosted Coolify instance. This guide reflects the live securelyprogramming deployment (app served…

4 min read