About Me

My IRL name is Hugo Whittome, but I go by WilfSilver on the interweb (yes that is pascal case… in most cases). I have not decided yet whether there should be a space between the names so we are at the stage of like I’ll do it if I’m feeling like it.

For the boring stuff: I have a Masters in Computer Science (1st), currently a full time professional (full stack) software engineer, working in the cybersecurity sector; with experience in over 20 programming languages, all learnt over the span of over 10 years.

Interests

My interests vary on a weekly basis (as my friend says I like to jump at anything shiny and organise my whole life around it), but it normally derives from:

• Internet privacy - I come from the opinion that for national security and just general security, privacy does actually matter.
• Programming languages I like: Rust, Zig, Haskell, Perl, (fake statically typed) Python, TypeScript. A bonus one as of writing is Nim.
• Linux, just Linux.
• Single player story based games
• Long walks in the countryside
• Getting distracted in the middle of a - wait how long ago was lolcode deprecated?
• Cool stuff

I do ask myself sometimes, is there a life outside of Computer Science?

Tech Stack

As mentioned above, these change regularly, but as of writing this, the programs I use are:

• Void Linux + XMonad + Eww (I really need to swap to Wayland at some point…), Fedora Silverblue + TBD: river
• Some sort of Firefox-based browser (because Google). I switch quite a lot, mostly on LibreWolf, but bonus points to Zen browser for nearly making me switch.
• AstroNvim since LunarVim was deprecated, unless having to use Jupyter notebooks (which is sadly happening more and more often) which in that case its VSCodium
• Proton Mail with SimpleLogin (but they have now been merged into a single thing)
• Anytype for note taking which is probably a bit of an odd one out here 🤷
• YubiKey - they are so so so cool
• TrueNAS, CoreOS and hardened K3S, for self-hosting stuff, but that requires its own breakdown.

Past Projects

I have worked on a bunch of projects, sadly a lot of them are not open source (because work) but some of my own cool ones are:

• Stream signer — my dissertation, which built a specification and implementation of signing video streams to try and combat Deepfakes
• Full Graphics Renderer in Rust — this was a University CourseWork and I am quite proud of my achievements of making a fully fledged renderer from scratch in Rust, which included Photon Mapping blur and antialiasing features.
• TheMazeGame my NEA project at A Level, a truly infinite maze generation game designed to counter overflowing bits while generating an infinite maze for you to explore using C++ and OpenGL.
• FROOM — Cool project for just finding free rooms on Bath university campus (this was done with a group of friends). Has a React frontend and Rust backend
• Basic link shortener (in Rust) — I mean there’s not really anything else to say about this
• 2in1screen but in Zig — Quite boring, I mostly just wanted some zig practice
• MagmaCube — BathHack 2023 project with my friends, where we did slime mould simulation in Python and OpenGL compute shaders
• RaceCondition — BathHack 2024 project with my friends, a competitive programming competition game with mario-like buffs and counters with a fatal flaw of new lines not correctly being escaped when running the tests. Used Go for the backend and Svelte for the frontend.
• RacketReady — University group coursework, where we created a (just about) progressive web app for finding pairs for different sports at the university. Used React for frontend and TSOA for backend
• BathCS Wiki — More of a side project for me at University of writing up a bunch of knowledge for hosting projects for free and some basic organisation and security procedures. Built using Astro Starlight theme (so no coding sorry)

On the side of all of this I have also setup a kubernetes cluster (with dual-stack hardened k3s across 5 nodes) at home running some self-hosted applications. To back it up I use volero and push to another NAS in the house. But this cluster is mostly there for me to experiment with and have a bit of fun, like setting up an LDAP server and Mailserver.

Blog theme

This website is using the astro-paper because it looked cool.