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Thoughts on software development and life.

  • Published on
    If you are exposing AI-enabled capabilities in your product and supporting external integrations, there is a good chance you will implement an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to handle tool calls from LLMs. When you do, you will need to manage authentication, input validation, multi-tenant isolation, and more. Instead of starting from scratch, I have put together a starter-kit that gives you all this out of the box: JWT-based tenant authentication, input validation, per-function metadata, cloud-native & container-ready with Docker, and standard endpoints as per the MCP spec.
  • Published on
    A custom web application firewall (WAF) can help protect your web application from various threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), etc. If you ship software to customers or even if you host your services in the cloud but want more control, agility and/or simplicity, a custom WAF can help. In this article, I will show you how to build a custom WAF using OpenResty, a powerful web platform based on Nginx and Lua.
  • Published on
    Whether it's API abuse, scraping, DDoS attacks, or a threat actor probing your endpoints, detecting anomalies in server traffic can help contain these attacks and improve system's resiliency. Building real-time detection pipelines however can be challenging because of variety of factors including infrastructure, cost, etc. Offline anomaly detection is an important tool that can not only be used in the absence of real-time detection but can also complement it. Root Cause Analysis, Forensics & Security Audit, Shadow Testing, Training & Tuning Real-Time Detectors, etc. are some of the use cases. In this article, I will present a simple offline anomaly detection pipeline that can be used to detect anomalies in server traffic. This pipeline is designed to be lightweight, easy to implement, and effective for many common scenarios.