Meet The Speaker: Omer Levi Hevroni
As part of our preparations for YGLF 2019 Code Camp (it's almost here!) we're excited to share with you another interview, in the series of interviews, with this year's amazing speakers. Hear their stories and their professional insights. This time we're with Omer Levi Hevroni (@omerlh)
Q1: Tell us a bit about yourself
My passion for code started in fourth grade - my dad taught me Basic, and I was immediately hooked. Since then I’ve learned many languages (C# is still my favorite language after all these years) and had experience with various technologies (yes, I have a lot of experience with WPF and I’m not ashamed of it!).
Today I’m working at Soluto, an R&D center for Asurion LLC in Tel Aviv. I started working there 4 years ago, as a full-stack software developer - but it’s all changed 3 years ago. Asurion security department figured that the only way to scale security is by having developers in each team who cares about security and act as the local voice of security - security mavens. My manager offered me this role, and I grasped the opportunity with both hands.
Shifting to security was not easy - and I had to learn a lot of new things. It was (and it still is) a fascinating and challenging ride. OWASP (open web application security project, a non-profit organization focused on helping developers build secure applications) helped me a lot during this journey, and provide me a lot of useful resources. This is why I’m such an OWASP groupie and speak a lot about OWASP.
My current job is to help the entire team at Soluto produce more secure software. It is a very challenging job, which is why I’m enjoying it so much. Besides my day job, I’m maintaining a blog and speaking in various conference around the world, mainly about Application Security. I’m also using and contributing to many open source projects, and I’m one of the maintainers of Kamus (our secrets management solution for Kubernetes) and OWASP Glue (help “glue” security tools into the pipeline).
Last but not least, I’m married and have two lovely kids, and I tried to spend as much time as I can with them.
Q: Who is your favorite tech thought leader and why?
It was a hard choice, but I choose to name Troy Hunt (@troyhunt). Troy Hunt is a very famous security expert (among so many other things he's doing). He is one of the authorities in the application security field, and I learned a lot from reading his posts and watching his talks. Besides that, Troy also inspired me personally. Troy has many posts and talks about building your career (I highly recommend everyone to watch this talk - Hack Your Career, especially - why having an online identity is so critical for developers these days. He inspired me to start talking more in conferences, and later on - open my personal blog.
I’m very thankful for his advice (although we never meet in person) and I hope more people will get the opportunity to hear it out.
Q: What advice would you give yourself at the outset of your career?
Start working on my online identity earlier. Contribute more to open source project, try blogging, upload code to my GitHub account. I did some cool stuff (well, things I think are cool) and now they lost. It’s never too early to start, and you’re smarter then what you think. Get over the imposter syndrome and share!
Q: What will you teach us at YGLF 2019: Code Camp?
I’m going to teach practical tools for hacking your application. I know, you might be confused - this is a code camp, not a hacking camp, right? Why do we need to learn about hacking? We build things, not breaking them!
I believe that security is something that every developer must understand and care about - and I’m going to explain why in my talk (@shehackspurple) if you can’t wait to hear why, watch this talk by Tanya Janca.
In the talk, I’ll share about practical tools that you can use to test your application for security issues - what I like to call “hacking like a FED”. This talk is based on the experience I gathered in the last 3 years at Soluto, and I want to share this knowledge with others.
Thank you, Omer!
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