Hi,
I’m Stephen Rees-Carter.
Welcome to my little corner of the internet.
I’m a Senior Developer, Security Analyst, and International Speaker based in Brisbane, Australia.
Most of my time is spent working for Defiant (we make Wordfence), however I am the doer of technical things for WithExtraVeg, the Vegan company my wife has started.
You may have see me present talks at conferences in Australia and New Zealand, focusing on Security and Development. My latest talk features a live hacking, teaching the attendees how to protect their sites.
You’ll find more about me by browsing through my site, or finding me online under the alias valorin. I’m active on Twitter and my open source contributions can be found on GitHub. If you’d like to contact me securely, you can get my public key on Keybase. (You can also verify my online presence there too, if you need to.)
If you’d like to contact me directly, please send me an email.
Thanks for visiting my site!
Recent Talks
I’m an international speaker, having presented at WordCamps and Open Source conferences. I am to present fun and engaging talks, with lots of demos and minimal slides.
Upcoming Talks
- One unconfirmed talk, to be announced shortly.
Recent Talks
- WordCamp Port Macquarie 2019
My Year on the Front Line, Cleaning Infected Sites - WordCamp Brisbane 2019
Think Like a Hacker and Secure WordPress, live on stage - linux.conf.au Christchurch 2019
My Year on the Front Line, Cleaning Infected Sites
Latest Posts
- How to Shrink a WSL2 Virtual Disk
I’m a huge fan of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), especially WSL2 which uses a virtualisation layer to bring increased performance and compatibility to WSL. However, one of the few downsides of WSL2 is that it uses a virtual disk (VHDX) to store the filesystem. This means you can end up in a situation where […] - Usernames Are Not Secrets
A common misconception that I have observed a lot online is the belief that usernames should be secret, unique and hard to guess. While there are some limited cases where having a secret username is a good idea, most of the time it has no real benefit. Usernames are not secrets and should not be […] - Signing Git Commits With A Keybase GPG Key
A relatively unknown and underused feature of Git is the ability to cryptographically sign commits. It is an optional feature that provides a way for the author of a commit to prove ownership. It uses the author’s GPG key to leave a signature in the commit that can be checked later. If you’re a Keybase […] - End of Life for Zevive Pebble Apps
Unless you follow my work closely, you probably weren’t aware that I used to develop apps for the Pebble Smartwatch. The signature feature of my apps was a utilization of the awesome Pebble Timeline feature, which provided a new level of interaction and behavior that suited my apps perfectly. However, since Pebble was acquired by […] - Hello World (again)!
Welcome to my new website. It’s been a long while since I rebuilt my last one (two jobs ago, infact!), so I figured I should launch a new site and get back into the blogging thing. It may surprise some of you, but my site is now running on WordPress again. Yup, WordPress. There are […] - Opening the GNOME Shell Overview with a Logitech MX MasterMy beloved Logitech MX Revolution died recently, so I upgraded to the new MX Master, and I wasn’t disappointed -it’s just as awesome as the Revolution. 🙂 With the new mouse, I decided to try and use the extra buttons onthe Revolution. All of them work out of the box, with the exception of the […]