Bo Bayles Annex

Professional information

I'm a software engineer. I'm most interested in backend application development, Python tools, and reverse engineering:

• Current job: Solutions Architect at Wurl (now part of Applovin)

• Previous job: Software Engineering and Technical Operations at Observable Networks (now part of Cisco)

For more, see my resume.

Software projects

I maintain or co-maintain several open source software packages. Here are the the ones I'm working on lately:

• more-itertools - Python library for working with iterable objects

• boto3-helpers - Automates various AWS interactions

• ada-python - Python bindings (with CFFI) for ada, the library based on the WHATWG URL Spec 

• python-pure-cdb - Python implementation of the "Constant Database" tools and library

I've also been a major contributor to gcp-flowlogs-reader, flowlogs-reader, netsa-pkg, obsrvbl-ona, redis-collections, vod-metadata, and various other projects.

Reverse engineering

In my spare time, I like to use reverse engineering tools like Ghidra to examine the video games I used to play as a kid. Here are some of the cool things I've found:

• A hidden game inside Clockwork Knight 2

• Different characters for Saturn Bomberman

• Upgraded camera controls for NiGHTS Into Dreams

• Hidden extras in Three Dirty Dwarves

See Rings of Saturn and High Context Burning Rangers for more.

Other output

• Personal blogging:

  • The lost car chronicles - never unlock your doors (2022)

  • The Fifth Iron - yo, I heard you like this one song (2021)

  • Yes, you can play it - an appreciation of The GHZ, where I spent my youth (2018)

  • Playing it again - I will be the one to set your heart free and/or true (2021)

• Podcasts:

  • The GHZ Podcast - My friends do a show about Sega, Sonic Team, the 90s, and more. I did sound editing for the first two seasons, and appeared as a guest on a few episodes (2021-2022)

  • Sonic Weekly - I have also edited and appeared on another show about the long-term effects of Sega exposure (2023-)

• Tech blogging:

  • Being fooled by randomness - a lesson in how not to stream binary data (2020)

  • Yo, I heard you like decorators - using and abusing Python decorators (2017)

  • FTP, "Apr 26 02:xx", and you - troubleshooting on the edge of madness (2014)

• Policy blogging:

  • The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves - a snarky exposé (2017)

  • Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this - the followup (2017)

• Reference material:

  • Interpreting ESNs and MEIDs - on mobile phone technology identifiers, the most popular thing I've ever written (2010)

  • Calculating the Erlang-C formula - I was really into teletraffic engineering for a while (2009)