The Curious Engineer

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JonLuca's Blog

jonlu.ca

Essays by JonLuca DeCaro about programming, reverse engineering, product systems, travel, and technology.

Software / engineering practiceReverse engineeringSecurityEssays / personal

’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
62 from 16 Mar 2018 to 30 May 2026
Posting
now and then (4 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://jonlu.ca/feed.xml

2026 3

  1. Snowmen, Recruiters, and Terry Pratchett: The Web's HTTP Header Junk Drawer
  2. Smoothing the jagged frontier
  3. Vibecoding native apps has gotten really good

2025 4

  1. Markets as the ultimate RL environment
  2. SkyCards, ground truth: reverse‑engineering a flight‑spotting game
  3. Finding cool custom vanity CA license plates
  4. Optimizing AI Model Load Times

2023 3

  1. Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
  2. Exploring how Magic Link works
  3. Semantic search in iMessage, iMessage Wrapped, and AI conversations

2022 2

  1. Getting a vanity phone number with 4 repeating digits
  2. Web3, Free Candy, and exploits galore

2021 8

  1. Snapshotting memory to scrape encrypted network requests
  2. JavaScript gotchas
  3. Writing fast async HTTP requests in Python
  4. A boilerplate for SSR'd Vite, React 17, and TypeScript 4.3
  5. How to redeem $2000 of HNS for being a FOSS developer
  6. Fun VPN tricks due to Apple owning all of 17.X.X.X
  7. What is tax loss harvesting?
  8. Zoh-no Zogo: Manufacturing pineapples (and cash) with Burp Suite

2020 12

  1. Setting up Matomo in such a way to bypass adblockers
  2. Unlimited free WiFi on flights with T-Mobile
  3. Habitat 2020 - Coliving during COVID
  4. American Airlines is an e-currency company that happens to own some planes
  5. Thoughts on user growth and product
  6. Reversing Lyft's ride history API to analyze 6 years worth of rides
  7. How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses
  8. Promise.all vs Promise.allSettled in JavaScript
  9. Goodreads has a time to first byte of nearly 5 seconds
  10. Re-enabling context actions on websites
  11. How much space would it take to store every word ever said?
  12. The hidden value of automation in programming comes from saving mental context switches

2019 14

  1. 2019 Travel in Review - 52,848 miles, 137 hours, and 40 flights
  2. Flight stats, entertainment, and trying to crack widevine
  3. Email authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC out in the wild
  4. Reversing private APIs, Safeway, and not-so-extreme couponing
  5. Ember.js, Dr. Carvers Shave Butter, and disappearing products
  6. An analysis of activity on /r/churning
  7. Compensation in 2019 new grad tech offers
  8. Useful shell aliases and functions
  9. What's better - a broken clock or a clock that's always 5 minutes off?
  10. Around the world in business class: ANA RTW in J
  11. Identifying non-default global variables in JavaScript
  12. Experiments, growth engineering, and the perils of not disguising your API routes: Part 1
  13. Obfuscated javascript, scam emails, and American Express
  14. Class schedules, a cease and desist from Viacom, and accidental monetization

2018 16

  1. Uber, statistics, and a chrome extension
  2. Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights
  3. An introduction to credit card churning
  4. Making high-fidelity audio sound like it came through the phone
  5. Illegal streams, decrypting m3u8's, and building a better stream experience
  6. Leaky vs punch-through abstractions
  7. The Federalist Papers: author identification through K-means clustering
  8. The rise of megathreads on reddit
  9. Speeding up zsh and Oh-My-Zsh
  10. Old code is institutional knowledge
  11. On USC's CSCI-350 (Operating Systems)
  12. Disambiguating language type systems
  13. Information and economies of scale
  14. Words per minute is not a good measure of typing speed
  15. Why does this blog exist?
  16. 10x Performance Increases: Optimizing a Static Site