My last internship (it was awesome). A programmer developed a vacation/free day request application for internal use.
Asked if I could test it for security.
The dev working on it thought that was a very good idea as he wasn't much into security and explained how the authentication process worked.
I immediately noticed a flaw just from his explanation. He said it was secure anyways (with an explanation but his way of thinking was wrong in this case). Asked if I was allowed to show him. He said he was intrigued by this so gave me a yes right away.

For the record, user levels were normal user, general admin and super admin (he was the only super admin).

Wrote a quick thingy server side (one of my own servers/domains) for testing purposes.

Then I started.

Went from normal user to super admin (his account) through a combination of XSS and Session Hijacking within 15 seconds.

Explained him where he went wrong and he wrote a patch under my guidance 😃.

That felt so fucking awesome.

I used CSS to vertical align some text..

without checking Stack Overflow

Took the memory usage of a C++ program from 1.5GB to 700mb at work. Good times...

That time when I was wrong, the client was wrong, but my algorithm was right.

I'm proud of you son

Bored on a weekend i decided to write a html5 canvas game, got into the zone and a couple of hours later I was done and figured I should out it online. Then I realised my Wi-Fi was off and I had written the entire thing without Google.

Happened during an exam!
Had a viva session after the exam

Examiner: how much do you know about Linux
Me: (pulls out phone and shows him the kernel I have been working on)
Examiner (to other teacher): give him full marks already

When I Made Passworts visible in Chrome and the teacher sent me home...
...It was Friday!
Ps:
She sent me home because she was really fu**ing scared of what I did and even called my Parents

First year of my study (application development) (5 years ago).

We were finally starting getting courses on using Linux and the teacher knew I was already using it for a while so he said that I had to finish the assignment but could work on whatever I wanted next to that.

Assignment was installing a server, getting a web server up and running and compiling at least one program from source.

I setup the server in 20 minutes, wrote a script to do the rest for me and was finished in half an hour. (we got 10 weeks for this (1 hour every week officially))

Well, I was about to start doing my own shit when people started asking me for help.
Fuck it, I love helping people with the things I'm passionate about so sure!

For weeks, during that one hour, I was probably the second teacher. Got called all over the classroom and helped people with everything.

Afterwards (the course), most people said that I probably helped about the whole class pass that course and I got called the linux God etc.

From that day on, my nickname at my study, which even many teachers used was: Mr. Linux.

It felt awesome though!

And still whenever I visit that place again, one teacher always goes: Hello again, mr. Linux!

I wrote a Student Information system for my midterm project back in 94 written in Clipper and runs on MS-DOS.

I demoed & explained to the panel of professors how it tracks enrollments, payments, class schedules, grades and attendance of each and every student. Has user authentication, auditing and reporting functionalities.
It has a lite version also written in Clipper that can be installed on a Professor's laptop so that he/she can update records even at home, and would be able to sync with the db at school via a BBS. Telix for DOS (self-taught) was my choice for the BBS as it was shareware, has built-in Zmodem support and comes with it's own programming language called SALT (Script Application Language for Telix) that can be used for automating tasks. The lite version of my project would dump the updates on an ASCII file, compress the file using PKZIP, use the laptop's modem to dial-up the number to the school's BBS and send the file across using Zmodem protocol.
The main version would then download the file(s) from the BBS and proceed to do a sync.

After the doing the demo and answering all their questions the panel asked me to wait outside the room, called me back in after 15mins and told me that I don't have to attend that class for the remainder of the term. The happiness as the my classmates outside of the room gawked at me felt like King Midas himself gave my balls his golden touch.

Then in 97, 2yrs after I graduated, I accompanied my cousins to a different campus of the same school for their enrollment and right there on the bottom of the screen were my initials on a very very familiar UI! They actually used, and were still using, my school project. Needless to say my cousins didn't believe that it was written by me.

It's called code

Hacked a phishing website to phish the domain admin.

I started studying computer science 3 years ago as a challenge for myself, try something new, do something I knew absoluty nothing about.

I was always the girl who didn't know as much as the rest. I took longer than everyone else, made worse solutions. I always felt like a burden.

Yet today, for the first time, I really felt like a real developer at my last week of my summer job. Explaining a five year older collegue (with a lot more (web)dev experience) about design patterns, git, c++, and helping him to understand and use it properly.

Apparently I was smiling like an idiot because he asked me if I was making fun of him, while deep inside I was just so happy to be helpful.. 😊

Well... There is an App called 'Tinker' where you can create games and stuff with a Scratch-like programming language.
One day I made a really simple 3D Rendering Engine and as a demo a rotating cube.
Then I published it.

The Tinker-Community consists of mostly little children and therefore they were really impressed :D

The project is now in the top 10 of the most viewed projects!
(There are thousands of other projects on Tinker.)

Yeah... I felt like an badass...

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

Fixed a printer once

On my third high school CS lesson. I had corrected the teacher about 6 times and wouldn't shut up about Linux.
He walked to my station, saw that I was live booting off my phone with SSH sessions to 2 servers I was managing.
He instantly gave me an A for the entire semester and told me I can do whatever I want, as long as I shut up.

Installed a VM, on a VM, on top of another VM

VMception!

Getting annoyed by the framework made by school which we had to use. We werent allowed to use Laravel or other frameworks.

What did I do with a classmate, we expanded on the schools framework. Added a templating engine, improved routing, made a query builder and a few other things before startimg the real project. 4 weeks of building the framework to build the application in a day.
Where others were still using the schools framework were strugglimg and not able to make it.

Experience that made me feel like a dev badass?

Users requested the ability to 'send' information from one application to another. Couple of our senior devs started out saying it would be impossible (there is no way to pass objects across a machine's memory boundary), then entertained the idea of utilizing the various messaging frameworks such as Microsoft's ServiceBus and RabbitMQ, but came up with a plan to use 2 WebAPI services (one messenger, one receiver) along with a homegrown messaging API (the clients would 'poll' the services looking for message) because ServiceBus, RabbitMQ, etc might not be able to scale to our needs. Their initial estimates were about 6 months development for the two services, hardware requirement for two servers, MSSQL server licenses, and padded an additional 6 months for client modifications. Very...very proud of their detailed planning.

I thought ...hmmm...I've done memory maps and created simple TCP/IP hosts that could send messages back and forth between other apps (non-UI), WPF couldn't be that much different.

In an afternoon, I came up with this (see attached), and showed the boss. Guess which solution we're going with.

The two devs are still kinda pissed at me. One still likes say as I walk in the room "our hero returns"....frack him.

when was i feeling like a fucking dev badass ?
that time when i exploited an sql injection on a news website and added a post with title "Admin please secure your website ;] "
.
.
i was feeling like hacker man 😅😂😂

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

I wrote a hello world program.

In Assembly

Tested and checked in code. Left on vacation and came back.

The code I checked in still was there, still works, and didn't cause any fires while I was gone :)

Success!

When I was 12 and made an html page ^-^

The time when I've felt like a badass, was when I was bored at a Birthday party at restaurant.

I didn't want to use my mobile data, so I tried to use the wifi of the restaurant. I didn't want to ask the password of the wifi, so I tried to get access by guessing. At first try I got it by entering "nameOfRestaurantCurrentYear".

Then I was browsing Play Store and there was a recommendation of an app (forgot the name) that analyses which the device is connected to wifi. So that got me interested that I installed on my phone.

So I played a little with and discover several Samsungs and iPhones connected to it (Some of the them had their real name next to the brand. It would be funny to yell their name out loud and they would be looking around.)
But there was one device that I didn't recognized. I searched on the web but found nothing. So later as I go to pay my part, I noticed that the credit card device had a wifi icon on it. So I looked over to the cash register and saw the name of the brand. It was the brand I didn't know of.

So basically they were using transfer payments over a public wifi.

10 years ago, I found a vulnerability in the connection between an insurer I was working for, and the network of databases of municipalities. I was only a hacker in so far as kids who watched Hak5 are considered hackers, so I always carried this laptop with a fake access point, package sniffer, wep crack, sslstrip, etc with me.

The vulnerabilities allowed me to register a new identity, for which I requested a passport.

Walking up to the town hall desk with two passports with different names, both mine, was pretty cool.

I did not do anything malicious, and was hired to fix the issues (wep encryption on insurers trusted wifi, and municipality postgres gave write access to all third parties)

For a few days I was the coolest kid in school though!

I have my best moments but the first time I felt badass about computers was when I was at kindergarten.

There was one computer with one cool game with skateboard. I wanted to play but the other kids didn’t let me.

I thought that if it look like I fix the computer they will let me. I took me month or little more but I made shutdown bat(I didn’t really understood fully) and I added it to the game shortcut from usb.

One of the other kids started the game and the computer turned itself off. Hi tried a few times and then I offered to fix it, I created new shortcut replacing the “hacked” one and the game ran.

From that moment the computer and the game were always free for me.

Got an all expenses paid trip to the Bahamas as part of a company recognition initiative. They rewarded me for a database and website that made a series of books searchable by key learning attributes and resulted in several big sales. Last I checked it was still in use.

Little Jakob finds out you can open a js in (mobile) text editor.
Little Jakob finds an nether mod for early Minecraft PE editions (0.7 @ that time or so).

Little Jakob changes some number and vars and creates an Aether mod. (works the same like nether but other blocks&tools).

Little Jakob publishes it with screenshots in a video, gets 30.000+ views on youtube, mod reviews etc. There hasn't been an Aether mod before.

Little jakob feels badass.

2 years later I revited the video - and found out that the mod was licensed and I did something "illegal".

Seeked the internet and apologized to the original author (who was aware of this copy mod) - felt bad, he forgave me.

I'm a simple man.

When the code that I write is released and used by thousands, if not millions, that's when I feel like a badass.

I met some guys who were Computer Engineering students who were studying web platform as a hobby aside from IoT lessons at school, they met me at my school's library coding stuff and I noticed one of them messing around with yum

"Is that Fedora?" I said, because I wasn't familiar what are the package managers of every distro.

"No, it's CentOS" the guy replied, he also noticed I was coding in a cloud IDE, so he was amazed. He asked if he can use C# there, can he share his workspace, etc.He also asked what's my course. I replied " i'm jsut a senior high student". And they were out of words.

after that, I always think that my skills are way ahead of my age. I don't know my brain anymore, but I felt badass

When we published our first game like Portal 2 mod in Apr 2016 and had the lead (female btw) developer of the largest Portal 2 mod let's play our small mod and say "pretty good, fun to play!"

Today >1100 downloads. <3

My first PR approved for open source community. WOW !!!

It's felt like heaven. I'm done something useful 😍

Dev Badass Rant

There are two occasions really:

1) For our C++ project in the third semester, we had to build any kind of C++ application. Guys in team of 4-5 built record keeping systems and calculators and one even made a Tic-Tack-Toe app. My friend and I, just the two of us, made a simple program that plays Rock Paper Scissors with you. With the power od OpenCV, it used the camera to track your hand movement, predicts your next move using contours, and displays the winning move as the computer's move.
For example, if you play Rock, the computer would predict that you were gonna play rock and display paper as it's move. It wasn't perfect, but it was ours, right from scratch. When it worked at the presentation, I was swell with pride. 😂

2) I was interested in game dev so I started Unity. The first tutorial in Unity you find is the web series by Unity about rolling a ball. You simply make a platform and control the ball with your keyboard and the camera follows your ball. You also make pick ups and get points based on that. So I started there, finished the tutorial, added a few walls, made edible and non edible pick ups, dimmed the entire scene, adjusted the camera angles, transferred controls to mobile gyroscope and added a few other things and voila! MazeBall was born. It has only one level and I thought it was pretty shit.
I decided to show it to a friend and when I showed it to my mate (the one who I worked with in the C++ project), my other classmates saw it and were impressed. Like so impressed a couple of them transferred it to their phone and took home with them. 😂 Was inspired to improve.

Second day on the job, only one with no real degree in software development (did much stuff in free time, just finished school, got the job mainly because i knew people there)
So you can imagine that they were sceptic about me.

Chief executive whatever told me there is a problem with some JavaScript they can't fix cus there is no time and shit for that.
I was like ALL IN and said i could do this in a few mins.

Fixed it in 20 mins. Everyone was cheering. I was like "Well it was the right decision to not do my homework back in the days.." 😁

Once, at school, last year, we had to present a C# project that, upon clicking a button, took words from a .txt file and showed them in an alphabetical listBox...

Since the file they gave us was so long that we had to wait a minute or so to get the listBox full, I implemented a progressBar which popped up on the button, and upon clicking it, the progressBar advanced for every word it loaded, until, upon finishing, it would have disappear leaving again the button, and the listBox would have been loaded.

Apparently, this choice alone – even if it had next to nothing to do with the exercise – was enough to give me a solid 9 out of 10, because our professors never explained us about progressBars and I used that completely on my own... I tend to do things like this in class, where I explore what my tools could give me.

So long story short, I ended up having the best vote in class for that, and I was so happy and motivated :D

Moral of the story: if you can, always try to learn something new about your tools and your programming language, on your own, because apparently it gives you advantage towards others, at least in school. Or even if you're not in school, it could still be something cool to learn that might be helpful in the future, for your projects or your job's projects.
The more you know, the better!

Setup Slack integration with SQL Server to feed realtime reports to channels....the company estimated this would take 1 week, I did it in 1 hour. Boom. Suck it.

I bypassed the payment system on a paying Internet terminal in Egypt by booting into safe mode. I was 14, and there was no other way of getting Internet, so I was really proud of myself 😁

Our software uses a lot of video/audio hardware. But this hardware goes away when we deliver to the customer.
So everyone was asked to think of a way to be less depended on hardware.
I thought of a very clever idea and I told it to two senior software engineers who both saw much potential in it.

I've only worked here for close to 2 months. And I feel like this is a major contribution if they'll use my idea

Next week at the brainstorm session I'll have to present my idea (informal meeting)

I'll make an update when I know more

The experience that made me feel like a dev badass was when a teammate accidentally deleted the database for production and I had the latest backup. Everybody was panicking not until I told them I had the solution

Automated a process which was being perfomed manually for 5 years !
Client is so happy comes up with more stuffs to automate.

Writting C++, hitting compile and getting no errors or warnings first time.

Attempting to access my colleague's NFS directory on his VM, don't know the VM's IP address, hostname or password:

- 2 minutes with nmap to narrow the possible IPs down to ~30

- Ping each and look for the one with a Dell MAC prefix as the rest of us have been upgraded to Lenovo. Find 2 of these, one for the host and one for the virtual machine.

- Try to SSH to each, the one accepting a connection is the Linux VM

- Attempt login as root with the default password, no dice. Decide it's a lost cause.

- Go to get a cup of tea, walk past his desk.

- PostIt note with his root password 😶

FYI this was all allowed by my manager as he had unpushed critical changes that we needed for the release that day.

Coz dual boot is too main stream...

A few months ago my now boss, then he was my mentor and school teacher asked for my help with a feature, said he had tried for some time and couldnt get around it, I solved it with regex in less than a day, and the company is like the golden standard of my region. The issue itaelf wasnt hard but being able to help my mentor was pretty cool

I finally learned how to use child classes in a real world situation.

TL;DR
I accidentally surpassed(?) my user permissions and closed some of my classmates browsers and locked up a terminal for me

In school we have 2 primary operating systems: Windows and Ubuntu. Windows is hell in general and but not as hell as the firefox installation on Ubuntu.

"Just loaded this page. Now wait half a minute so that I can render it"
"Woah, woah, woah. Slow there. You just made an input event. Give me those 5 seconds to compute what you just did"

Executing "top" or "htop" shows you a long list of firefox processes with a cpu usage of 99.9%, since the whole school shares that linux environment.

Anyway, one day it was way more servere than normally and I way forced to kill my firefox instances. So I pressed CTRL+ALT+T for that terminal, waited 5 minutes until it accepted input typed "killall firefox" with a delay of half a minute per character and smahed that enter key.

At this very point in time I could hear confusion from every corner of the room. "What happened to firefox?"

Around 30% of the opened browsers where abruptly stopped. I looked back to my screen noticed I was logged out. I couldn't login from that terminal for the rest of that day.

Our network admin, which happened to be there, since the server is just next door, said that this was just convenience, but the timing was too perfect so I heighly doubt that.

I felt like a real hackerman even if it was by accident :)

On my first year of high school made a flash webpage for my class. It is still online.
...
Too embarrassed to share link.

First internship during college, developed an app for a month, company sold it for $30k, customer extremely excited about it. Best feeling ever 🤗 - wk65

Freelance project I was working on was deployed. Without my knowledge. At 11pm. Their in-house "tech guy" thought that the preview build i gave them was good enough for deployment. Massive bug, broke their api endpoints.
Got a call at 2 in the morning,asking for a fix. I told them how it was their fault and the App they deployed had TESTING written right on the main screen.
They promised additional payment to get me to fix it asap.
Went through the commit history (thank goodness their tech guy knew git, fuck him for committing on production though) and the crash reports.
Removed three lines. All became right with the world again. 😎

This week actually. We had an Innovation Week. I was tired of waiting for the company's collaboration tech team to give us some kind of virtual whiteboard system (they also won't let us use things like Google Hangouts or Microsoft One Note, etc...so they make remote collaboration and planning almost impossible)

Anyways long story aside I proposed we make a virtual whiteboard we could host internally as a web app using STOMP over Websocket. They said "there's no way you can finish that in a week". I did.

And it came out great. It even supports pressure sensitivity and different brush textures. Everyone loves it and teams are like...wow we could use this member facing too. Had like 5 people around my desk connected to it drawing dicks for like 30 minutes. Then our boss joined remotely and saw the dicks. They laughed their ass off.

tldr; was told there was no way I would complete an ambitious innovation project...completed it with style. Damn I am good.

Making a Twitch chat bot withing four days after starting to learn programming and python.

The downside is that now that I look a it I feel a bit embarrassed with the mess I made. But hey, it works!

Occasionally i got my badass moments at work.
But that one bachelor party in Barcelona where about 10 of my pals and I came back from a soccer match topped it all.

As we got back to our AirBnB apartment i went to the bathroom and scanned the WiFi.
I found the IP address of the bachelor's party man of honor and MITM attacked him.

So each image from any http server would automatically get swapped with a picture i took just an hour ago from the game we were at.

5 minutes later i hear the screams "OMFG WE ARE ALL ON THE NEWS GUYS!!!" and "LOOK AT SPORTS SITE X AND NEWS SITE Y!!"
The saga continued with some cheers in the beginning and some confusion, but ended when another friend rat on me..

But boy it was glorious 😂

Resolving a problem that a senior couldn't. (17yo, junior)

In school we had to create a project using Java and SQL we created a library management software.

In India a teacher from other school comes to check your projects and allot marks. (They just take a viva and give a marks)

Out of the whole class he asked me to present my project (they usually don't look at it ) and he checked each and every file asked a lot of questions.

Viva went on for 45 mins (usually 10-15 mins) and when the whole class is looking at you like what did they make.

Yeah that made me feel like a badass dev.

I made a website at school, for my school, with games blocked at my school.
😎

Well two days ago, i was in a sap codin g camp (ranted about that)
The challenge: moke a robot that avoid collisions and 6inds a black mm spot on tha floor
We marginally had enough time te implement sth but well i tried to do an algo.
10 mins before deadline i realized that it wouldnt work. So i took an old prototype (without algo) from the trash bin, fixed compilation errors and went to the competition without testing. Because we had to do a little explanation for the parents about arduinos, we all were shaky. A friend of mine even failed to remember his text xD

Asso, because of Fortuna wanting to beat us down, we were the last team driving in the arena. Everybody got pretty fast times. (with a random algo). At the end, we took our robot with the untestet thrash bin program.
It drove pretty well, avoided collisions and then it happened: it reached (only robot not to collide) the black spot in 1:09!!! 😁

Connect my Coffee-Machine to my Network.

I work for a bank and every production release date it's a chaos... Like, for real, devs running to get their stories approved by the testing team and last minute scope changes that, if not made, would make the whole app fail (real shitty management as you can see).

Longstoryshort, a dev didn't finished one of his stories and create 7 major bugs with another... Today that was my breakfast, took me 4 hours and get it all done and approved... We didn't make the release tho, but I scored some major points with this.

Funny thing, tomorrow I'm telling my PM I'll leave the company for a better job, so that will be their breakfast.

Yesterday, when my Discord bot came into a Voice Channel and said "Hey Guys!". My friend really surprised. 😃😀

Nothing big, but the time I felt the most useful and awesome guy in the world was when I wrote a script creating PDF cover letters from a csv file with contacts names for my gf. A bit of Latex and python, a few hours to make it resilient to special characters, but the look of relief (she would have done it by hand) and admiration in her eyes truly made me feel proud :)

Felt like a real badass in middle school when I made my first .bat script that would recursively open itself. Took only two words. Four if you wanted exponential recursion rather than linear. And I came up with it by myself.

Cheesiest thing ever, but I really loved freaking people out by opening it and just watch windows grind to a halt as it would run out of ram opening thousands of terminal windows. Hell, it still gives me a kick today when I show it to people the first time :D

Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.

Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.

Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”

So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wrote a library that helped the start up I was working for solve a major issue and get funded

Completing the project 1 Day Before Deadline w/o Night work

Today I build a queue to spread the load of the 300.000 daily caculations. To prevent slow server response time from to many analist calculating at the same time.

First run on the server I managed to get the server load to 120% and get us offline for 30 minutes.

Accepation environment and production are on the same hardware.

Today was not a good day.

Felt like a badass when I figured out a way to get my massive wallpaper collection onto my company provided laptop which was completely and I mean COMPLETELY locked down.

I couldn't bear the thought of using the default Windows wallpapers 😂

Using vim for the first time and not needing the mouse.

500 Internal server error when showcasing the semi-complete project to client.

Can't be worse, can it.

Six or seven years ago, I worked for a large financial organization as part of a very large effort to convert server assets from physical to virtual. The consultants on site were in bed with the vendor of a terrible piece of software designed for that purpose. After a couple weeks on the job I'd had it, and sat down in between sessions of "validating" the conversion procedure, and started writing my own software for converting Linux servers. After a couple days it was working great, and they wound up adopting my software as the default method for Linux conversions.

Years later, I'm interviewing for my current job and one of the interviewers tells me he used my converter some time later and loved it. Pretty sure it's what swung the interview for me.

So I had this internship in highschool for some marketing company creating simple databases for them to help out with their business.

When I came back from college for I think winter break they had asked if I would come in to help with a task that was going to take all day so they wanted me to come early. I agree and show up the next morning.

They had an Excel spreadsheet with about 5000 records in it and one of the fields was the name of the customer. They told me that the records came in as lastName, firstName or as lastName,firstName.
They wanted the field to look like firstName lastName. For a minute or two they had someone show me how they have been doing this which was just by hand. I don't really work with Excel so im not too keen with the macros. But it took me about 1 Google and 30 seconds to find someone with a similar macro to achieve this, I altered it a bit and let it go through all the records.

It was an awesome feeling when I went to the boss to let them know I was done (it had only been 10 mins), they almost didnt believe me.

Funny how one line of code can turn a day's work into a matter of minutes.

Being able to print a message on hundreds of thousands of printers all over the world

Went to college feeling like I didn't know enough to keep up with the game development course, ended up knowing so much that I tested out of my entire first year and ended up teaching my professors what to do. I got special permission to ditch classes and on several occasions taught the class stoned off my ass. I didn't need to submit homework or take tests. I had my own game studio founded so I was allowed to show off my work as my final project. College was a great time for me lol

Writing tons of code without testing and it all works

Secretly installed Automate app on my friend's Android phone to mess with him. (For those who don't know, with Automate you can automate anything on an Android device).
Made a 'flow' that would read his incoming sms's, and send an email to me with his exact location if I sent him an SMS saying 'where are you?'.
Was funny to mess with him and tell him his exact location even though we were miles apart.
Cleared it up for him a while later but it made me feel like #hackerman

When my first TCP program made contact with another computer.
That was glorious!

I'm just a student, but I always feel like a badass when the class treats me like almost like a teacher when it comes to programming.

Our actual programming teacher is new, so she doesn't always teach well (don't get me wrong, she's nice and I do know my place as a student) so my classmates usually approaches me when they need clarification or they got an error on their code. Makes me feel useful :D

I know I added a rant to wk65 already, but this is another one.

At my final project at school, I made an app that registered all your medicine, surgeries, appointments and medicine alarms, so it worked as a medical history. It also was able to show on the lock screen, in case of emergency, your allergies and recent but dangerous surgeries.

At the presentation day there were 3 guys, me and two of my colleagues. The first one had a car dealership tracker, really awesome app, which I helped build by teaching him everything I knew about Android, I didn't do any code, I really just taught him. The second guy, he made a pharmacy tracker, to which, again, I helped make without doing MOST code (I helped on obtaining GPS data). First presentation was awesome, second presentation was really boring because the guy was constantly showing the judges that the app could detect when you were offline (really simple to do).

At my presentation, I thought it was horrible, super nervous and I even thought I was trembling.

So, then, the judges spoke, apparently they knew I helped the previous two, they thought I had the best app, they thought I had the best presentation and needless to say, I got 20/20 on the project. One of the judges even said that if I was selling the app, he'd buy it.

The second colleague didn't like that, and I later found out he was focusing so much on that offline stuff because he wanted to show he was better than me, shows that I really need to see who I really should help...

I felt really really badass after that day, because I left the school, and to this day, I had the best app/project and grades that school had seen and given. Even more when the school offered me a scholarship!

I made a real working example of elliptic curve encryption without code examples in javascript. I really felt like a badass.

In school, for the last project of the year
Had to show it to the teachers in charge
When I entered in the room they said my name and looked at me with a big smile
The usually took 15min per project, but they looked at mine for ~35min
One teacher was testing and the other one was writing
Everytime the second one was asking about a feature the other one said "perfect"
I was so proud of me 😁

Had a couple occasions to feel like a badass, recently.
I'm the only programming polyglot on the team. They've been wrestling with an encryption problem. I crack open C, make a few calls to wincrypt (yes, I'm sorry, we're a Windows company) and give them a dll they can call in their IDE. They were stunned by how fast it was.
Last week, my manager asked if I could put together a communications module for our flagship software.
Him: will 3 months be enough time?
On Monday, I had an alpha of the module ready, and a standalone simulator of the module, and a couple different examples of how to communicate with it written out in python.

Childish thing really, and slightly related to my current job

Was working on a small pet project (it was a website really) back in college, and collaborating with another friend on it who lived in a different city. Had to show him my progress but he wasn't a programmer, just had to show him how much front end part is done and the functionalities till that time. Of course hosting it online was the best solution, but I was a student and broke.

So I got this python script caller pagekite which would make my laptop into a server for the duration I run the script. It ran but I couldn't manage to show him the site for days since I didn't know where it was connecting to. (No one had any docs on it back then)

Did some tinkering and saw that it connects to localhost, so I fired up my xampp server and it worked as I wanted it to :')

Since that day, I decided that I want to be a developer and learn and implement more of such things.
Moral: the smallest, insignificant things can sometimes give you the most happiness.

I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.

We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.

The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!

Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...

I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!

True story!

PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!

Enlightened my colleague on the concept of JS promises, chaining of events, multiple deferrals...

Ah, his code is looking much readable already!

Helped the web developers team with SQL. Left their office like a god.

Was on my first internship, told to analyse and prepare stuff for the Android dev to build an application for a big client. Did it before the end of the internship and team was satisfied with my job.

Because the Android dev had already lot of works on other stuff they let me start the development of the app.

The end of my internship is coming, the app is not finished but the team agreed that my work is not bad and that I should continue to work on it.

I finally get hired to finish the app, when we first publish it 95% of the code was mine and the boss started to stress because he let an intern (that became an employee) build the application from the ground. But the application got quickly its 4.5 stars on the playstore and more than 10.000 downloads.

I quit the job a few time after the publication of the app but I feel proud and happy that this team let me work on one of the biggest project they had as I was only an intern without any professional experience.

This is not "badass" but this is my first and best experience in the professional world !

Ugh, what made me feel like a dev badass?
Not renewing a domain in production.

My first experience with any kind of development was in a web mastering class in high school. I got super into it and started going really far ahead in the course materials.

During the second semester most students in the class were not interested at all so I decided to start a business of selling custom tailored assignments to about half the class. It didn't make me rich of course, but it felt good being the HTML / CSS god in the class.

The best part honestly was getting caught. The principal was so impressed at the amount of extra work I'd been doing that he just gave me a detention. Thanks Mr. Murray, for being so cool and not putting me down for doing what I love.

When i made a little web prototype platformer game using js and then wanted to show my friends as they all wanted to play.

1. Setup all the files on my phone.
2. Made a web server on my phone with relevant file permissions.
3. Setup a web server on my phone and joined the network
4. Smile as it worked when they all connected through the browser to the relevant IP/port

This post just made me realise i need to get another phone lol

Just started a new job three weeks ago. I was doing pair programming with another developer that has been there two years; I was assigned an issue and wanted his opinion on it. He implemented a fix that involved multiple complex if statements.

He was surprised after I went ahead and showed him that the variable in question could be used (it was either 0, null, or > 0) like a boolean. I brought it down to 3 lines; a single if statement. Felt like a boss.

During Summer school (yeah I'm an idiot) I disabled this LanSchool Helper thing with a few lines of powershell script(fuck windows, havent used it since I was like 15) that allowed the teacher to see what the students were doing on their computers. Instead of finishing my failing courses I was then able to spend the rest of my time that Summer honing my programming skills.

I graduated a year late, but had easily become the best programmer that school district had ever seen 😎 And by impressing the kids sitting next to me while I browsed docs, blogs, stack overflow, and youtube - rose to be a Summer school legend.

I am a dev badass. I am legend. 😂

There was this project where a bunch a scripts had been running for three weeks analysing a bunch of fileshares. The project was in overrun and the analysis wasn't anywhere near done.

I was given complete isolation and a team of people who were instructed to do anything I needed. I had them replicate the data to as many machines as possible and I started scripting the analysis with some sample data. After half a day of collecting laptops, desktops and severs I transfered my scripts to those machines and ran the analysis in 5 hours.

I felt like I saved the project.

I've been interested in security for years but despite knowing the theory I've always had this disconnect with actually doing it, about two years ago I finally managed to find and exploit my first cross-site scripting vulnerability in my companies Product whilst doing some routine acceptance testing. It was a penny drop moment for me which has led to some very interesting projects and It was pretty badass.

The time when the algorithm was so complex, that after understanding the logic, the tester quit...7+ yrs and it still works in production...bugless

This is one from when I was in school, so I wasn't a dev but it made me feel like a CS student badass.

A class mate and I were having a discussion about his study habits. Basically he was freaking about the mount of studying he was going to have to do for this class:

Me: dude, you need to relax. You'll do fine.
Classmate: no, have you seen the amount of work that is on the syllabus? The size of the book?
Me: wait you bought the book? Also we took this same professor for several classes. His syllabuses are always huge. What did you get in the prereq to this class?
CM: an A.
Me: there you go.
CM: but I had to study all the time. I had no free time.
Me: really? I had an insane amount of free time.
CM: what did you get?
Me: B+.
CM: See but I did better than you.
Me: yeah . . . but I had fun last year.
Professor: you know, it's hard to tell who is the better student. The one that had no fun, but got an A. Or the one that had a lot of fun and got a B.
Other Classmates: probably the guy that got the B.

Hurray for peer and professor validated laziness.

Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.

Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.

The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).

We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.

The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.

Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.

Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.

Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do.

Few months ago I was working on something rhat wasn't mission critical for the current sprint. Near the end of the month I was asked to help the BD team (which usually do the testing) with testing the webapp as well as the mobile versions. First day of me testing ever, found more bugs by myself than the 5 BD people did in the entire week. Really felt like a boss. Next month they asked me to help again. And again. And again.
This is how my desk looks nowdays (the 3 phones are behind the laptop charging)

Interprocess communication with MemoryMappedFiles.
It took a while to figure out how interprocess communication works.

Correcting my bosses code!

Adobe labs released one new component, I played with it after two days. Went to an interview with huge company after two weeks for a developer position, the interviewers was from different departments, they asked about one technical challenge they have, then I suggest the new component as solution, they gave me small task to implement using the component, I delivered it next day... Then they hired me in R&D department. It was great days.

Fixed a huge bug from a friend's Android app!! Still proud of it!!

Lambda

No x-server, wayland. just drm and framebuffer. use computer just fine in this env. I can watch youtube and video. play music, play twitter, read rss, edit my program, surf a web, connect with other computer, view my image, read pdf with this freaking lightweight env.
Basicly, my super battery saver mode.
(want me to list all of these cli/tui app?)

When my old boss from previous company called me to take on a project that their current developers didn't able to finish. I return to my old office like a saviour of the day 😝

Company had problematic client projects that each client has a bucket load of change requests. Company doesn't know how to say "No" to them. Company can't afford to pay the subvendors for the changes and the subvendors aren't willing to do them for free.

I went in, reverse engineer the shit out of each application, database, system, documented my own findings, changed according to each client request. This involves editing tables in MSSQL, rerouting PHP files, adding field and validations in C#, passing parameters in VB to Crystal Report, and managed every change request into my own personalize ticket system (that the company does not have).

Saved the company, everyone was grateful. A couple of months later, the company hasn't paid my salary on time, I left like a boss.

They're in shit again and need my help. Haha!

Simple but useful..
Wrote a greasemonkey script to convert url text to hyperlinks..
Reduced lots of time in finding the log url from the error response..
Helping me in debugging faster..

When I got X up and running at 1am for the first time on my first computer, 486 SX 25MHz with 8 MB or ram.

The program SuperProbe is probably depicted now, but it got me up and running back then.

For my AP Comp Sci final project I put a ton of work in, and built a mix of space Invaders and galaga, and called it Space Invaders 2. I created the thing on my own, with no partner, and I did all the art myself too. It was easily one of the best in the class.

Learning to use arrays in conjunction with for loops... Simple but still made me feel goooooood!

I did reverse engineering on window command prompt hahaha

of course it was just for the commands:
· set
· cd
· start
which were the ones I needed because the admins in my school blocked cmd.

Not really coding, but debugging complex problems. I love it when I have to dive in head-first and dig (very) deep to find answers to super-complex problems. I once went into the internals of a programming language to understand why a library was acting up in a particular scenario. Another time I had to optimize and re-compile from source (after modifying it) so that the application would not leak its memory. (Of course, I contributed it back to the language).

The inner satisfaction that you get after all that hard-work when it finally works, pays off! Bliss!

Using hard coded profile images as a placeholder.

Successfully juggling razor blades.

My team lead at my summer internship hailed from an MFC background.
I was able to dictate a whole block of jQuery code to her orally while I was in a hurry to go for lunch, and she typed it in. And it ran perfectly in the first time itself.
jQuery isn't a great deal, but it was a confidence booster for a guy who had only worked with JS for a week.

First job and first days, boss comes to me with an urgent matter she nor other people were able to solve per her own words, it was something I hadn't even used before, a bug on a migration from versions between SSDTS projects, so she asks if I knew the technology, I answer no, but I'll try, so I started watching some tutorials and got hands on the project to know what it tried to accomplish, then in a couple of hours I found the bug in a connector it had with some other tech through a driver. Team went semi crazy like woah how you found that so quick, Bla blah... It felt good

Copy pasting code from SO.

A program I was using did not recognize a flag that I needed, so I edited the EXE file (using notepad++, no hexeditor) to replace a flag whose name was actually checked with the one I needed. Worked like a charm.

The response for my bug report was "this feature should not be there in the first place, we will remove it". Lucky me they did not remove it earlier.

I remember the first time my Frontpage built website (in a time people used frames and had never heard of css) got 3000 visitors in a month. That was awesome.

Way back in high school there was a school wide competition to see who would represent the school at the bigger competition (I dunno, regional or something). Halfway during the test I was on the third out of four tasks while pretty much everyone else was on the first one. The teacher saw this, looked at what I did and said to everyone "He is already on task 3, does everyone agree he represents the school?"
Everybody said yes immediately.
:) The dev equivalent of a K.O. win, felt pretty badass :D

Fixing the error

Here in my country banks doesn't have a public API to access your bank account extract, 3 years later we make some bots to extract these data to an API

My high school computer labs all had Macs and SSO for the students. I found out that they had remote login enabled on all of them.
Using CSSHX, I could log in to every computer in a room simultaneously, turn the volume all the way up, and make them sing.
I never tried any privilege escalation, so my capabilities were basically limited to that.
Still fun as hell to freak out everyone in a room all at once.

When I was in School we had one Computer room where the PC's were the school used to 'teach stuff about pcs' (mostly office and some Maya). These where connected to another via the network and reset to a predefined state Everytime they were rebooted.

Since we were somehow able to get into the room during breaks between the lessons we obviously abused the room and played Minecraft in there but since the machines reset each reboot there was not much progress. Also there was no Java installed, so we needed to install that as well (that can take ages on old, school machines.).

Since the machines were connected via the school network I found out how to reboot or shutdown the other machines remotely. That was really funny for me and a friend who quickly found that Minecraft is too boring. We were just constantly rebooting the PC's the others were just launching Minecraft on and thus resetting the whole Java and Minecraft installation.

Got a lot of angry curses but nothing serious happened afterwards. Was the first I felt really badass on the computer tho.

I made an optical character recognition engine once. Seeing it actually work was a really cool experience.

Rewrote a dashboard on my own in under 6 months helping them to secure some major sales and investment.

Maybe not so wk65
but nobody posts a awesome regular expression?
come on, it says "exp."
someone gotta write one!
(not me, i suck with regex)

When I published my first app and some people made an official thread in a forum. When I went there they told me I had done a good work. Needless to say they don't know me at all.

Things which make me feel badass tester (and dev too) are: dark themed IDEs, using command prompt/ terminal (still as exciting), and when my code actually works lol

I want to play a game with 2 mods, but the problem is you can only play with one of the mods at a time.
So I wrote a wrapper in C and now I can play with any number mod I want. 😎

Setting up an FTP & Plex server for our house.

>> This was in my infancy of programming and tech, so it made me feel like a complete fucking BADASS.

Figured out a heisenbug in the app that my coworker (a rockstar 10X dev who I look upto to) couldn't pinpoint at. And then we both sat together and fixed it :)

In a Computer Systems class, we had a project to debug and buffer-overflow a program written in x86 Assembly. There were 2 mandatory problems we had to figure out, but the teacher told us there were 6 in total that can be solved. Not only did I complete all 6 on the next day (the project was due 2 weeks from then), I also noticed something looked weird in the code, so I investigated and found a hidden 7th problem and solved that too. Only one in the class to do so, and the teacher said I was the best student in any of her classes this year.

Psychedelic trance, Sennheiser headphones

We had to code a logical operator in my computer science class in high school. Because it was a low level course we were given 2 hours to complete the assignment.

During the same time I started being interested in ML so I decided to build a simple feed forward neural network. The guy next to me looked at my like I'm a wizard for the rest of the semester. It felt great!

When the program exactly fit on the MCU, using up every available byte of flash. It was just a small display unit, but it felt nice that I had chosen the smallest possible controller for the job.

Did a webGl. + angular project this weekend that does the same as my thesis project (directx). The only difference is the time it took me only 2 days where the thesis project took 600h. pretty badass in my opinion 😎

Being a devops ;)

I once baffled a colleague by showing him that you don't have to (and shouldn't!) use memcpy to copy struct-instances into a different variable in C, which in turn baffled me.

Good times!

When I was studying web integrator.
At first I didn't even know html, yet alone what a php tag or extension meant.

I quickly caught onto it though and started to grasp that the procedural stuff they taught was really outdated.

So I researched intensely and eventually whipped up my very own php framework.
- if you're interested, it lives on github.com:sasin91/php-framework

Obviously it's a pile of fungal infested dung.

but ey, I was light years ahead of the rest of the class.
Besides, we all gotta stackoverflow somewhere :)

When a solution architect who has been in the company for 20 plus years turned to me and asked how to do a certain thing in Git.
;-; i am a god

Getting a page to serve properly for the first time on a webserver I wrote. It's pretty basic, but it does exactly what I want: it only handles "GET".

Finally, after days of research and failures, I managed to understand and tweak TensorFlow's program for image classification.

The feel of power, arcane knowledge and fascination is just incredible.

Might not seem much these days, nobody was interested in it. But I, deep inside, knew: I was proud of myself.

I had been building dumb Minecraft mods in Java for under a year, and my parents wanted to know how much I was actually teaching myself. (I was 15 at the time.) They signed me up for a CS introductory class that taught Java at a local college.

One semester later, and I passed it with flying colors at (I think) the top of the class :D

When I was on my first internship, I started developing an Android app, while my friend developed a C# program that read a .txt with info and references from a mail service (in my country it's CTT).

The damn .txt files got really really big, na she had to display all of the data in a listbox (it was a PoC) and when he pressed the item, it had to fill some fields at the left of the listbox.

Needless to say, he didn't learn of multi-threading yet, and I had, so I taught him how to multithread so the app wouldn't lock up while loading the massive .txt file.

The listbox filling made a cool animation (like CMD executing commands from a bat file) and we even implemented a progressbar.

I felt like a badass Dev after that.

Coding my first small Website with only HTML and CSS. But it felt like I was a coding god.

Created a CRM for the business which integrated every database in the network, SQL Server, Postgres, Firebird and MySql types. Evolved to writing a series of procedures which replaced a staff members full job though..

When I made an actually working logon module in PHP

My journey from not knowig anything about programming to actually helping other student without their lab work.
Gor me that is actually a pretty good feeling :)

When I was working on my dissertation project. I was implementing a video sharing platform. Using Dropwizard for REST. I wrote the entire endpoint for uploading a video in one session. I was just taking a stab at how i thought it could work. Tested it in Postman expecting to get some kind of error.
And it worked first time.

So I am redeveloping a website I made for work when I first started all this a year and a half ago. Part of the project was integrating with a marketing automation suite through an OAuth2 authenticated API - compounded by the fact that no one has heard of the thing, so there aren't plugins (wordpress last time, Drupal this time) or the ones that are there are woefully out of date/have no functionality.

Anyway, I've been dreading doing it. Last time it took me over a week (maybe two), and the solution was a total cludge fest - I had to do a load of stuff manually and it constantly broke anyway.

This time? Took me half a day, maybe less. All the user has to do is click a button and give the webpage permission in the automation suite (as you'd expect) and everything else is automated. It doesn't break, it doesn't fall over and it works very nicely.

It's the first time, apples to apples, I can see how far I have come, and I love it.

Now if only the API itself i am connecting to wasn't shite!

When I got at least 20 comments for a mid-sized changelist and managed to dodge/reject the suggestions provided. No questions asked further and it was committed!

My badass dev moment was when I read a valve white paper on text rendering and implemented a dynamic text version of it in webgl. That white paper was about signed distance fields and how to hack the alpha channel of an image to bake in some font smoothing data.... Holy fuck that felt good. Oh and it looked good too!

A day during a group project i gave a sneek peek at the code of a friend and pointed out that he was assigning 1.8 to an int... "oh shit that's why it wasn't working! I've been on it for two hours!"

Not really a big deal, but was fun, during the second year of high school once I made a hidden C# program that would randomly open the CD lid and put it on some PCs of the lab and with some friends we watched the teachers get freaked out by the possessed computers (just to put things in perspective, today they still have windows XP, and their most recent laptops have windows 8 NOT 8.1 !!! And the "technician" says that they must not be updated wtf)

Eventually they couldn't find what was the problem and factory reset the computers

Also, we swapped Google chrome e IE icons and names on the desktop , pure evil

Working with ubuntu server in virtualbox over windows server 2008 🙃

Mine was quite recent. I discovered that there's no real pre-existing way to create an SQL statement in C# when the number of targeted columns and the number of conditions is not predefined, so I custom built a reusable class that I now keep in my collection of tidbits.

Of course, someone here is going to tell me that there is something already.

Where did the wk65 topic go 🤔🤔

Fixed one issue in Google bubble chart in our project which is still there in examples at google.

When I was 13 and made a Visual Basic application to convert the weight in other unity. I used Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition 😀

When I first, at school, set up a program to check how many devices there were on the network using nmap. Then I graphed it over a day and it made me feel real awesome checking out a network and getting info on it, however primitive my methods were

The time when I started building my first interpreter. I had no idea about them so I just copied the code from the book but it felt good really good and I learned so much about compiler and interpreter design. I guess copying the code and seeing things connect was the best and badass experience for me.

wrote some excel vba shit and managed to debug it

When I finished making fully customised theme for my blog(Blogger). I felt awesome, I was 15yo.

Making the scarab from Halo 2 a working vehicle in Halo Custom Edition

App of a little social network I'm member of didn't connect to the server anymore, since the social network changed their SSL-certification and my smartphone is too dumb to accept the new one.

So, I pulled the source code of the app from GitHub and added some code dealing with SSL-connection-exception-handling.
A warning appears, that there were some errors with the SSL-cert with the question how to proceed and three options:
Quit, Ignore for now, Ignore and don't ask me again.
The code to ignore ssl-errors is just for debug-/develop-purposes, but hey, app with that little "hack" is running only on my phone x)
Now, the app is working again at my smartphone \o/

Reversed a TSOP programmer software that only ran with Win2K (due buggy HID handling) and rewrote to run multi platform :)

A few years ago and today very shameful: Griefing Minecraft servers with an own "Griefer-Class". The class was completly enclosed into a simple ArrayList ( with {{ }} ) to hide it in JD-Gui (decompiler many are using) and had a own remote client that could send own as well as server commands via kinda like a telnet connection.

That were times... 😏

When we went live with a site with millions of daily hits. It was the first project I lead and took 8 months of very hard work to finish.
Bonus: I felt even more badass when it didn't crash :p

Didn't know how to do backend development. The organisation I was working for then needed a simple backend. Learnt some PHP and developed the entire backend in less than 8 hours

PS In hindsight, the code was grotesque, but at least it worked!

My experience was very recent. I was working on my game engine, Pillar3D, and realized that the setup allowed it to be automatically multithreaded with little to no concern about deadlock or race conditions. All based on the assumption that individual levels don't talk to each other, and that moving entities between levels could be done between frames. I can even track about how much work each thread has to do and use that to distribute levels among the threads. Now I can do things like force UI trees to exist in their own level and get fantastic multithreading.

1. Run all the unittest and have a full green
2. Run a simulation
3. Run a simulation and all works properly
4. git push

What I don't know, I invent (make) it.
That's make me feel badass

This is my story.

So, as you know, I'm a developer and so does all of you, but before I know about devRant, I was stuck with Instagram.

Yup, I was stuck with those instagram memes who was made by those social media manager who doesn't know shit about coding and post shitty memes anyway with those #memes #codingmemes #coding #codememes and all that fucking annoying hashtags.

I hate it. I was stuck with it for two years but thank god for the people who told me about this app.

I love it, but, there is some problems. As you may know this social media was created by developers for developers, and I know that this app users is very supportive for other users because of the same profession, but what if non-devs people found out about this app and start doing job offers and spamming at our feeds.

What could we do?

This isn't too big, but it was big for me.
I was on a school trip to place X, it was a math competition. I was in grade 8.
The kid whose family hosted me and my friend for the competition was in 10th grade. One night, we were playing on the PS4 when he went off to work. Turns out he had to make a website for a technology assignment. I looked at it, and told him, "What's this? Looks easy. Really easy." I'd done a similar thing in grade 6. When I told him he asked me to show him the website. I downloaded it off Google drive(where I keep it) and showed it to him.
It took me a couple of minutes to convince him that I'd made in grade 6. Made me so happy :)

Showing off devRant to my dev friends. Other than that, I don't think there's anything that really made me feel badass 😂

When I say NO.

Made big change got the way some code worked. Fixed one error in my code that always causes an exception, and expected to spend another hour working on the code until it works, then having it compile and run without problems after fixing that issue. I was shocked it actually worked the way it should.

HELLO WORLD

There was a presentation day for the MSc I was participating in as a student.

The teacher was talking sassy things to a student that replied likewise and I stood up for him with reasoning and he just didn't like it (he wanted to be the boss in the class).

Then it came the time for my presentation. It was about augmented reality that I knew a lot of. So I opened the presentation and immediately the teacher threw some sassy things to me. So I stayed at the first page of the presentation that had the title and some fancy photos and screenshots and I started speaking about augmented reality from the ground up.

Needless to say, when I got to the second page the teacher had nothing bad to say and was almost admiring what I had to say.

I think you can call that badass.

Having a lot of stickers on my laptop

Everytime I start writing code with nano directly from the linux shell.

Learning modern metaprogramming C++. Because I'm not even sure if there is others people working on it in my country x)

I am an intern and was put into a fresh project to do node back end. They didn't really give me any supervisor because the company lacks employees and has too many projects, and they were afraid I won't do myself. I was assigned to a front end oriented colleague to make a team, and cooperation with him is really demanding. After a month, a company that outsourced for us did a complex code review and said we wrote some darn good code, and they were said we are both mids (while colleague is a fresh Junior with an intern by his side). Damn it felt good :)
And also our pair is said to be the only Dev team in the whole company that can call client for itself, without PM or any host of the call, as others, with a lot of experience, need to be guided through each call :D

While listening to my own thoughts when talking to an windows fan boy defending the boat nevertheless it sinks deeper over time maybe 🤔

Day 1 of Engineering Programming 100. One "System.out.println("Hello world");" later, and I'm like "Yeah I'm a hacker so what?"

Finding that you can disable users from changing their Win desktop background picture in the Registry.
Endless hours of fun and amusement and a great way to teach employees that we have an ISO to abide by.

Coding in spacemacs on Arch with i3, completely removing the need for mouse