Robert Heaton
Robert Heaton — Software engineer, Anthropic Frontier Red Team
Thoughtful essays on programming, security, and the human side of software.
robertheaton.comDice Football was a surprise, obsessive, breakout hit. As long as we kept our son fed with pens and exercise books, we could have all the showers we wanted.
Part security researcher, part parent blogger, part game designer — Robert Heaton's blog resists easy categorization. He writes deep technical explainers on HTTPS, TCP attacks, and online tracking, then pivots to hilarious dispatches from fatherhood or inventive coding projects he builds with his kids. The range is the point: every post reflects genuine curiosity from someone who can't stop pulling threads.
Written by Robert Heaton since 2013.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
8
Independent Blog
English
How this blog's content is accessed through Blogs Are Back.
Full Content
RSS feed includes complete post content for reading in-app
Direct Access
Feed can be fetched directly from your browser
Direct Post Links
Post pages can be loaded directly in the reader
Embeddable
Posts can be displayed inline in the reader view
This blog appears in the following curated collections.
Recent posts from Robert Heaton's RSS feed.
diceomatic: a DSL for making children's dice games
My five year-old is into football. Really, really, won’t-sit-down, won’t-let-anyone-else-sit-down into football. My wife and I spend every free minute taking half-hearted shots on goal; feigning agony as a daring counterattack puts us 23-0 down; and answering quiz questions about which hospital Harry Kane was born in. To buy us a minute to breathe and shower, I invented a game called “Dice Football”. In Dice Football you roll two 6-sided dice, add up the numbers, then consult a table to see wha...
MinorMiner: we turn your kid's maths homework into Bitcoin
Hello! Hello! Welcome, welcome. My name is Hobert Reaton, and I’m here in this shabby motel conference room to present you with yet another once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. Look at this picture. Tell me what you see: Do you see learning? Self-improvement? The future leaders of our country? I’ll tell you what I see: wasted computing power. Between the ages of 5 and 18, the average child in full-time education completes about 5 maths worksheets a week. Each worksheet has 20 questio...
It's not cheating if you write the video game solver yourself
My wife and two little boys sometimes go on trips to see friends or family for whom my presence isn’t strictly required. While my wife books the flights I make a show of weighing up my options and asking if it’s really OK if I don’t come. Eventually I’m persuaded that it truly would be the best thing for all of us for me to have five to seven days to myself with no nappies and all Nintendo. My wife hits the “Pay Now” button and when the confirmation email comes through I call my secretary and t...
Come and work with me on Anthropic's Frontier Red Team
I work at Anthropic on the Frontier Red Team. Our mission is to find out whether AI models possess critical, advanced capabilities, and to help the world to prepare. We’re hiring AI researchers and engineers in the US and UK, and if that describes you then we’d love to talk. We explore questions like: can models design bioweapons, or accelerate vaccine research? Can they orchestrate massive cyberattacks, or defend our critical infrastructure? Can they self-improve, or build a business, or fly d...
PyMyFlySpy: track your flight using its headrest data
“Where are we daddy?” asked my five-year-old. “We’ll land in about an hour,” I said. “No I mean where are we? Are we flying over Italy yet?” I wasn’t sure. Our flight was short and cheap and the seats didn’t have TV screens in the headrests. I looked around. I noticed a sticker encouraging me to connect to the in-flight wi-fi. That would do it, I thought. A site like FlightRadar would answer my little man’s question, down to the nearest few meters. But unfortunately for him I’m the creator o...
If you enjoy Robert Heaton, you might also like these blogs.
Julia Evans
jvns.caApproachable explanations of Linux, networking, and debugging through zines and comics.
Fuzzy Notepad
eev.eeEevee on game development, Python, and deep technical explorations.
Troy Hunt
troyhunt.comSecurity researcher and creator of Have I Been Pwned. Expert analysis on data breaches and web security.
Andrea Fortuna
andreafortuna.orgCybersecurity expert, software developer, experienced digital forensic analyst, musician
Follow Robert Heaton
If you like blogs that are equal parts technically rigorous and genuinely funny — where a post about TCP exploits might sit next to one about inventing dice games for a toddler — this is it.