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Friend asked me to teach him how to hack. FML.
Today friend tells me he bought a $200 course on "Ethical Hacking". Asks if he can translate those skills to "cool hacking" CTRL+C4 -
Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?
Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.
<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."
T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away
T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"
I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.
Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."
<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>
Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."
About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.
100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.7 -
Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.
That time when...
He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.
He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.
He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.
He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).
He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).
He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.
He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.
He set up a new email account for each individual online service.
He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).
He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).
He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).
He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.
He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.
He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.
He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.
He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).
He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.
(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).
He ate a sim card.
He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).
He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.
He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).
He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).
He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.
I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.
26 -
So earlier today as I was walking out of class, I overheard some people talking.
One of them said “Oh I hacked google”
Then the other one said “Oh yeah I hacked google aswell. I made it say (something I forgot)”
They were thinking that using the dev tools to make one of the tags say stuff was hacking.
😤😤😤😤😤😤😤😤😤😤😤
I had to run away
It was t o o m u c h9 -
Warning: Long rant ahead!
So we built an amazing system for managing swarms of drones, and we have flown hundreds of hours, testing, etc.
Comes a client and says, that he wants to buy our system, but he wants to integrate it in a bigger system that is supposed to orchestrate many small systems.
Sounds like a deal.
So they send me on a week course (see previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2049071/...) to learn how to integrate our system in theirs.
I was sure that they have some API or something and it should be a breeze. but apparently they give us an SDK that includes all their files, and we have to build and run their entire system, and then build our own API inside of it!
And the reason we needed a week-long course, was to know all the paths where the XML configuration files exist!
So for the last month, I am hacking away inside this huge program, navigating thousands of files in a language I don't know, in order to build an API for their system, so that I can use it on our side.
Yesterday they informed us that a new version is available.
And sure enough, waiting in my inbox this morning was a link to download a new SDK.
No Changelog, No Instructions, Just a zip file with over 25,000 files.
So I phone my contact in their company to ask how exactly I am supposed to update their files, and his answer was: diff them!
WHAT! 25,000 files, half of them built by the c++ compiler, tens of configuration files scattered in different places, linking all the new libraries from scratch, are they crazy or what?
And then he tells me that they are working for 15 years this way. That's why everyone hates them I guess.
going to have a long day...
P.S. many more rants to come from this integration.5 -
devRant competition - can you convince someone that you're hacking?
Requirements:
Windows (Linux is too easy)
You must use genuine windows command line and the following commands:
color 0a (if this isn't supported in your windows os, you can change it in properties)
cd C:\
tree
The point of this is to see how easily you can convince someone you're hacking/doing something malicious. No prize or anything, I just want to see how ignorant those muggles are.8 -
One day browsing the internet, I find a website that is hiring web developers. I was curious, so I decided to see the requirements.
Job : To manage this website
Skills Required
6+ years Experience of
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Node.js
Vue.js
TypeScript
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Ruby on Rails
ASP.NET
Perl
C
C++
Advanced C++
C#
Assembly
RUST
R
Django
Bash
SQL
Built at least 17 stand alone desktop apps without any dependencies with pure C++
Built at least 7 websites alone.
3+ years Hacking experience
built 5 stand-alone mobile with Java, Dart and Flutter
7800+ reputations on stack overflow.
Answered at least 560 questions on stack overflow
Have at least 300 repositories on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.
Written 1000+ lines of code on each single repository.
Salary: $600 per month.
If he learnt all languages one by one at age 0, he will be 138 now!14 -
So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.
Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.
Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.
Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.
Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.
Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.
OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.
Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.
Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.
Shit runs fast on several cores now!8 -
@echo off
color a
echo Hacking...
ping localhost -n 5 >nul
color c
echo Failed, aborting...
ping localhost -n 3 >nul
pause4 -
That moment when your mobile internet is so slow and you decide to ssh into your server and use elinks to browse the web and everybody around you is like "he's hacking" and I'm like IM JUST TRYING TO READ FUCKING NEWS BECAUSE GUESS WHO DOESNT PAY SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY FOR 1GB PER MONTH WHERE 500MB ARE USED AFTER VISITING ONE FUCKING SITE BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY DAMN ADS ON IT. I JUST WANT TO READ NEWS OR LEARN SOME C++++++++++ BUT INTERNET IS TOO SLOW TO OPEN FUCKING DDG.
Browsing the web in terminal is super nice btw. Really recommend that8 -
What you are expected to learn in 3 years:
power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,
and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices
This is a major called "computer engineering"4 -
LOL that's why I love C!
The function pointer cast for strcmp because qsort expects a compare function with two const void * pointers instead of two const char * pointers, that's just beautiful.
Not to mention the hack to abuse strcmp on a struct - which just works because the first struct member is a string and the rest just gets swapped with memcpy as opaque data.
I guess that wouldn't pass a code review at work. :-)
6 -
My wife was done with exercises on her electronic 88 keys piano.
Me: I also know something nice.
Her: oh so?
Me: (repeatedly typing key #3)
Her: (thinking)
Her: C hacking?!5 -
The best language to learn.
well actually there's no "best" language, only a good programmer.
all languages can be useful, coding for games, coding for apps, for hacking.
don't choose language because people says it's the best language.
choose 4 languages you find them easy to understand, do basic coding in this 4 languages.
after this, compare it and take the one that was most fun to write.
of course language like Python is more easy for non programmer to study.
but some people find C++ more fun and easy to understand from the beginning.
enjoy and if you have a question, comment it.6 -
It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.
My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.
I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.
I never went back to the Assembler book.
A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.
That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP. -
I started programming when I was 14, because I was deeply enrooted in MMORPG hacking communities. It gave me an escape from real life, and I felt empowered by the skill to create something from nothing. My first language was Lazarus FPC, followed by VB.NET, C#, C++ ( managed and unmanaged non CLR ). As time went on, I found more ways to turn my "hacks" into software, and finally I began selling subscriptions which required me writing an authentication system.
After weeks of research, I began writing my own REST API in PHP using MySQL as my database. At this point I had an IPB forum up and running for a year, but with my newly acquired knowledge I was able to couple my API with my forum software. To properly distribute my API i had to learn NGINX to route my API to a subdomain.
Soon after I began writing my own portal for my authentication system, at which point I had become entirely enveloped in Web Development. I was 17 when I dropped my forum, I'm now 21 and freelancing web app consulting, day job as a QA automation developer. -
>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.2 -
Programmer: "Places : instead of ;"
Javascript: "What the fuck did you just fucking post about me, you absolute beginner? I'll have you know I worked for ten of the biggest silicon-valley industry companies, and I've been involved in over two hundred top secret projects including NodeJS. I am trained in refactoring the most fucked up code, and I'm the top C++er in the entire fucking internet-connected universe. You are nothing to me, but just another IP. I will fucking revoke your commits from your gitlab account with absolute dedication using only one Rasperry Pi client. Mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with posting that shit on one of my numerous very personal blogs? Your devices are fucking bricked, kid. My attack software can be anywhere, anytime, and it is tasked to remove your entire git contributions from planet earth. Not only am I extensively trained in remote cross-firewall device-hacking, but I have access to over 100 of the United States CIA and NSA git repositories. If only you could have known what doom-bringing C-one-liner you have raised from my fucking hands, maybe you would have held your fingers. But you could not. You did not. And now you're paying the price, noob. I will hail havoc upon your puny online-presence and you will drown in your own badly designed software. You're fucking offline, kiddo."11 -
I might create a coding course for people actually interested in learning how to program correctly (not Get Rich Quick Bootcamp style, not webapps, not magic Javascript incantations).
I have an idea on how to structure it but I worry it'll be too weird for most people to follow (starting from binary theory and then teaching machine code and then working upwards to C and beyond) explaining how a computer works along the way, showing the real errors with annotations explaining things, etc.
I've always wanted to teach in this format but I feel as though it's too.. idk, "useless" to most people? But I've never had a friend go through e.g. CodeAcademy and come out knowing how to actually make applications from start to finish without just hacking together random React components and hoping the frankenstein project works well enough.
The target demographic would be those either completely new to programming or just have a fundamental or web-centric preexisting knowledge, or maybe those who simply want to understand computers better.
Am I barking up a shitty tree?28 -
what do you recommend for me to learn about next?
I have learnt about:
- web frontend/backend (php)
- android and java
- c, c++, nasm, gnu assembler
- parallel computing
- cli operating systems
with that background, what would you recommend?
I'm considering:
- neural networks
- making a server
- ethical hacking
- starting a blog7 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?
I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!
Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos
That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!
Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger
Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!2 -
So recently i got a message from aa person asking how to (these are exact words) ,
:break into insta's database using Sqlmap"
I then proceeded to tell them to "f*ck of ya c*nt ".
Afterwords it inspired me to write this rant
annoying classmates:" hahaha GuYS bEtER wAtcH OuT he's GonnaA hack Us"
me: " yea I can program I also do some ethical hacking and cybersecurity "
annoying classmates: "hahaH Bro your a Hacker OhHHhHHOOO BrO CaN yoU hACk inSta FoR mE I NEEd MoRe FolloWeRs "
me:" tf no one that's illegal and two it's waste of my time "
annoying classmates: "BrOooo CaN yoU gEt Me SoMe HacKs fOr CsGo"
me: "can you just please f*ck off , i'm not hacking for you everything you've asked me is extremely unethical and a huge waste of time, Also if you suck so bad at a game you need to cheat I recommend just stopping "
annoying classmates: "DUdE whAt ToolS dO i HVAE to DownLOad To Be A haCkEr"
me: *trying hard not to murder them* " I told you to f*ck off"
being a hackers isn't downloading tools it isn't typing at 90wpm into a terminal with green font its not about games or fame or anything its about coming up with creative solutions to problems , thinking outside the box its about individuality and breaking from the heard , looking at things from a different viewpoint,
it's about endlessly seeking knowledge.
It's about freedom though creation that's what being a hacker originally was. But because of big media and movie company's (and script kiddies) people now confuse hacker with cracker and think of us as jobless fat kids sitting in a dark room in there parents house breaking into bank accounts and buying drugs on the dark web (which people see to think there a hacker just because they can open tor browser. they then proceed to use google to look up "fresh onion links 2020") .
My classmates and really my generation has a huge case of smooth brain. They a think we can just look at someone and hack them they also seem to think using a gratify link to get a persons up is hacking and using the inspect element is hacking and that opening a terminal is hacking ! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"
Anyways ima end this here thanks for reading :)5 -
I started coding by playing really bad video games. After being suckered into using what allowance I had, I started hacking them to make them better. This led to hacking up MySpace... (ha) That led to actually trying out new languages and eventually unity3d/c# to learn proper coding techniques. I regret nothing!
-
!rant
So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.
But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.
Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!
Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.
Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.
So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.
Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.
So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.
So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.
Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad. -
From the abandoned university my first dev project came from the course of programming 1(C as language).
I had to implement a robot that moves inside any matrix like map following both specified rules and random moves, and had to reach sooner or later the exit place of the room.
At first I was overwhelmed by the task at hand, then I had to calm myself and start hacking around to get any idea on how to even understand what's required to get to that point.
It obsessed me for the whole first 2 weeks, but the progress was quiet steady.
Then I hit a fundamental problem of state and movement of the robot... And, as always, the best thing to do at this point is to simply detach your attention from the issue|project.
In the same day my mind asynchronously bursted a solution to my problem, and after some time I came back to the project and accomplished it with 100% of the requirements met 😁
This is what it looked like in the console(minified here):
3333333
3000003
3000003
3003003
3003003
4003023
3333333
Guess which is which 😉2 -
everything is going as planned! :)
Learned Rust Lang. i loved it (that doesn't mean i am done learning na? No! never stop)
new language i could do game memory hacking in without worrying about C++ memory leaks or issues. it also compiles to assembly! another of my favorite languages!
(i use rust for game development and other stuff)
i am not leaving C / C++ though that would be harsh!,
i abandoned javascript for react and typescript.
to be honest the developer just made javascript and left us with a [object Object]
finished learning the android java api so im basically set anything i want to make i can just go on my pc, listen to music and write it out in a couple of days.
well phazor what are you going to do now?!
i will code till i am old.
i will leave my mark like a shid that made its skid in the bowl :)5 -
Getting started with my dissertation project for my degree. Using Java and Dropwizard for a backend service with a nice iOS client in Swift. Will make such a refreshing change from hacking crappy eForms together with jQuery and an Objective-C native bridge.1
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i hate it when Im coding and my friends joke around and call me a hacker or nerd when they couldn't even print anything if i told them how to do it plus its not hacking if you believe its hacking when im typing code on python or c# online then you need to go back to school6
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