One day, you will be dead. Each year that passes after your death, fewer and fewer people will remember who you were, what you did or what your face looked like. Eventually, you'll be completely forgotten. Who cares if that side project you put out sucked or not. Might as well put it out there and see what people think. There's a good chance too that the project won't even be remembered even by the time you die.
The best way to get experience is to do things, so given that no one is going to remember, might as well try to do it. Your successes won't be remembered along with your failures.
Wanted to share this gem: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People (reddit.com)
The key takeaway for me was:
If you consume any content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways.
The post is worth a read and there are many interesting comments.
When Rome's military went from citizen soldiers to full time specialist professionals, the misalignment of incentives between the specialists and the citizens was the subtle, long term root of many problems. I think this is the case with programmes as a profession, as hacker culture is diluted by more mainstream commercial interests. The easy money in ad-tech has attracted brogrammers as our standards and expectations for privacy and security seem to decrease with each passing year.
This is why I constantly work to become a better storyteller, both for personal and professional reasons. You must promulgate the narrative surrounding yourself and your work or someone else will.
I prefer to remain annonymous and keep private as much as possible. This unfortunately goes against the zeitgeist in an time where it is popular to write essays to announce a departure from a job, share what you ate for lunch on Instagram/Facebook/Github and even personal blogs to some extent, etc.
Time spent talking about your work is time you could be spend getting things done. Unfortunately humans absolutely require a narrative surrounding anything with which they consider themselves associated with. It’s vastly superior to that being one provided by you (by human resources, hiring managers) versus one invented for use by those who know you. So here I am, enjoy the story.
I've been playing around with Jekyll for two days and it is unfortunate that I have to install some Ruby packages like Bundler if I wish to Setting up your GitHub Pages site locally with Jekyll This could all be done within a VM but I also find the workflow and Jekyll itself to be rather cumbersome. So for now I am forced to test changes by pushing directly to production, sometimes without of even previewing my changes. In 2019 there must be some better alternative.
Jan 14: So I did end up trying openSUSE Leap over the weekend and it required over 40GB of hard disk, which I felt was excessive. I switched over to lubuntu and tried Hyper-V but I was never able to create a new VM without running out of memory. Sometimes I miss the good old days.
Hello world, today a blog is (re)born! Incidentally GitHub has announced unlimited private repositories for free users so that might have something to do with it! See Reddit and HN. I don't plan to blog so much as dump random snippets and notes on things I've read. Previous incarnations of my website appeared in the form of a Hatta Wiki but I suppose the collaborative nature of Github suits this purpose well. Markdown is still supported so the basic writing and formatting syntax will be familiar.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" I suppose people are curious regarding my relative silence and a "narrative" is required. That will be for another post. For now I will leave you with a question and answer. Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder? and an answer Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business.
These days my main interest is in cybersecurity and that will be my focus of my writings. The old saying goes: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" and I share similar sentiments regarding complexity. Hardware, software, platforms, and ecosystems are often unnecessarily complex and many of our security, privacy, and abuse problems stem from that. So a simple, static website hosted on Github Pages should suit my needs and my hope is there is little to no maintenance. The only constant in technology is relentless change but I'm sure Github Pages will stand the test of time..... ;)
The State Of Software Security In 2019
Interview with Mark Russinovich-the future of Sysinternals 3/5. Sad state of security, as an intractable problem U.S. has almost 500,000 job openings in cybersecurity
Dependency slurping systems like NPM, CPAN, go get, and so on continue to freak me out. They might potentially be more dangerous than manual dependency management, despite the huge risks of that practice, precisely because they make it ‘easy’ to grow your project’s dependency graph — and hence the number of individuals and organizations that you implicitly trust. (And their trustworthiness can suddenly change for the worse.) When there are significant gaps in a language’s standard library, third-party developers will eagerly fill those gaps with new dependencies for you to (not always knowingly) inherit. There is an effort underway to fill gaps in JavaScript’s standard library, which I strongly support for this reason. Dependency resolution is a good application of topological sorting.