Week 9 brought an unexpected halt to active coding as I fell sick for most of the week. Balancing the demands of ongoing academic classes while falling sick for most of the week proved to be quite overwhelming, bringing hands-on coding to a temporary halt.
Managing university coursework alongside open-source development while unwell meant having to listen to my body and step back. However, the downtime also provided a chance to reflect, review our foundations up through Week 8, and collaborate with my mentors on the upcoming technical roadmap.
Stepping Back and Mentor Alignment
Rather than trying to force commits while recovering, the focus in the earlier part of the week shifted to high-level review and planning:
Reviewing Weeks 1 through 8: Re-evaluated the merged contracts, the local zero-plaintext credential storage vault, and the triage monitor interface to ensure all foundational components remain aligned.
Mentor Support: My mentors provided thoughtful guidance during this stretch, helping review the workload and outline an adaptable schedule for our remaining milestones.
Maintainer Demo Video: Our project maintainers requested a comprehensive progress demo. I recorded and submitted a walkthrough covering both the live blt vanish website and the vanish application running directly from the terminal. Because the underlying build and platform errors had been resolved in earlier sprints, generating and presenting a clean, working demonstration was smooth and seamless.
Brainstorming the HIBP Exposure Pipeline
Toward the end of the week, as my health began to improve, I shifted energy toward brainstorming and refining the design for our data exposure intelligence workflow.
Privacy-Preserving Breach Lookups: Outlined the integration architecture for the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) API using its k-anonymity protocol, ensuring that full password hashes and user credentials never leave the client device.
Client-Side Identity Matching: Designed the model for correlating breach records locally using HMAC-SHA256 account keys, keeping identity analysis strictly on-device.
Timeline Organization: Planned out how exposure alerts will be structured, prioritized by severity and recency, and rendered cleanly inside the application timeline without causing alert fatigue.
Looking Ahead
With my health recovering, the demo submitted, and the architectural roadmap clearly defined, I am ready to translate this week's planning into active code. The immediate focus will be building the core exposure adapter, implementing parser test suites, and integrating breach alerts directly into the user interface.
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