Eugene's Spot

Welcome to my personal website! It is small, but big things have small beginnings.

My Posts

I write overwhelmingly on technical subjects. Some of my most recent posts include:

  • (2022-12-12) Spammers and those who enable them: An angry rant about how companies purport to oppose spam, introduce measures that restrict privacy and freedom on the web supposedly to control it, all the while using most of the same techniques that spammers do, thus making it virtually impossible for many people to identify spam quickly and reliably.
  • (2022-10-22) How to configure a pi-hole for minimum human involvement: A pi-hole is arguably one of the best bang-for-your-buck Raspberry Pi projects you can possibly do. They block ads and make your home network way more secure, however, its another server on your network that you have to operate and worry about. What if there was a way to automate upgrades so you could both not pay attention to it AND keep everything secure? Well... good news! with a couple of interesting configuration elements and purposely keeping the software on the Raspberry Pi to a minimum, you can! This post describes how.

About Me

I am a Software Engineer at Akamai and formerly a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. I specialize in a fairly wide range of topics including infrastructure monitoring systems, combinatorics, distributed computing, and discrete optimization. I am also particularly interested in computer security and related areas such as cryptography. I used to work at the UConn VoTeR (Voting Technology Research) Lab running experiments and writing software to find and prevent vulnerabilities on the voting systems used by the State of Connecticut, and was one of the co-founders of the UConn Cyber-Security Club.

I've always had a special interest in doing things myself which led me to engineering as a career path and eventually to computer science. That is not, however, my only interest. I love reading in general and particularly enjoy history, sociology, economics, and other humanities. I particularly love studying military history of the 20th century, the Cold War, and the Space Race in particular as the interaction of technology and politics has always fascinated me.

My blog will, hopefully sooner rather than later, contain more and more of my personal and research projects, both hardware and software.

Contact Information

Please feel free to shoot me an email at eugene at kova dot dev (ProtonMail is preferred).

I am also on Mastodon!`