Project Yellow Brick Road: Creative, Practical, and Unconventional Engineering

About this episode

Paul Conroy discusses unconventional engineering solutions to combat malicious bots and shares insights from his experience in election coverage.

Share Episode ⸺ Episode Sponsor: Rootly AI - https://dev0ps.fyi/rootlyai                     Paul Conroy, CTO at Square1 , joins the show to prove that the best defense against malicious bots isn't always a firewall—sometimes, it’s creative data poisoning. Paul recounts a legendary story from the Irish property market where a well-funded competitor attempted to solve their "chicken and egg" problem by scraping his company's listings. Instead of waiting years for lawyers, Paul’s team fed the scrapers "Project Yellow Brick Road": fake listings that placed the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street in Dublin and the White House in County Cork. The result? The competitor’s site went viral for all the wrong reasons, forcing them to burn resources manually filtering junk until they eventually gave up and targeted someone else.           We also dive into the high-stakes world of election coverage, where Paul had three weeks to build a "coalition builder" tool for a national election. The solution wasn't a complex microservice architecture, but a…

People in this episode

Hosts: Will Button, Warren Parad

Guest: Paul Conroy

Topics covered

• data poisoning
• creative engineering
• election coverage
• pragmatism in tech
• scraping defense

Keywords

• data poisoning
• malicious bots
• election tool
• Google Sheet
• Cloudflare Worker
• scraping
• pragmatism

Sponsors

Rootly AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Square1

Places: Dublin, County Cork, 10 Downing Street, the White House

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