The Perfect Storm:

My worst coding mistake? Yeah, let me tell you about that. I pushed a simple JavaScript/HTML change without knowing that the stupid header was shared with another "not so important" section of the site called "My Account" where people go to pay for their services. I call it the perfect storm because I left early that Friday for a weekend cruise and right before leaving I pushed the change, sent the request to push for production and left. When they noticed that clients were complaining about not being able to pay they started reversing most changes of all teams trying to fix it but they never touched mine because they knew I wasn't working on the backend. My whole team worked over the weekend trying to find the issue while I was having fun in the cruise. They ended up reversing all changes by Sunday night and it took us about 4 more days to figure out that my simple JavaScript/HTML change broke the site and prevented 30 million customers from making payments that weekend plus it broke the whole 2nd release of the month.... yeah, nothing major.

Why can’t motherfuckers look where they’re going?

Went to the petrol station to put some more air in my tyres.

Some old dude was reversing out of a parking spot and had turned left so was now reversing along th back of the other parked cars.

I pulled into the car park, saw Home reversing and stopped, he was well clear of other cars, but he kept going back, I gave a little toot toot of the horn, but he decided to keep going and hit me.

It’s not the end of the world, and his insurance will cover it, but it will knack my no claims bonus.

Fucking Sunday’s, I shit ‘em

For security purposes, it should be good practice to lock your pc when you walk away. At my office, we practice harmless pranks when someone forgets, to "teach them a lesson". Usually just involves reversing/inverting displays, reversing mouse buttons, or changing the desktop background like this (because everyone is a closet bronie apparently)

THE TIME HAS COME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.

I finished the avatar editor on the rewrite. It works so well.

After trial and error in design, API reversing and more, I've finally done it.

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

What is everyone working on at the moment?

I'm developing WFXPG, my own DLL for a game called "Warface".
I'm interested in reversing, so yeah.

I'm curious...is there a practical application for reversing a string, other than for tutorials and interview questions?

To the wizards of reverse engineering here: how did you start learning how to do this magic?

How to reverse engineer without knowing how to reverse engineer:
1.Open IDA pro
2. Hit shift+f12 for the strings view
3. Choose an interesting string
4. Hit x and go over the xrefs
5. You are now earning at least $140K a year.
Bonus: say that you can code html

I am currently reverse-engineering the devRant Avatar APIs, I think I understand all of it now. I am curently making comprehensive documentation on it and I think I will release it (if the developers of devRant allow me to do so).

I am reversing it as part of my project of making a devRant client built in SwiftUI, because I really want to make an avatar editor on there, it’s gonna be SICK!

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

Frustration Rant!

Because old hardware means learning the hard way sometimes, I've had to purchase more goodies.

On my last update, I installed the rs232 shield which may have inadvertently been wired backwards for Tx/Rx from what im used to. I assume it is backwards to most db9 serial ports because most Arduino or other projects you would do with a pi have serial "in" connections like old routers and devices that would be "controlled" rather than the other way around. Anyway, according to a video on youtube showing a guy turning an old machine into an IRC client via raspberry pi, this shield may be swapped. That means that instead of interfacing with the old machine via a null modem crossover cable, I need a straight cable with male db9 on both ends. I unfortunately tried using the null modem crossover cable which was reversing the reversed pins all over again. I hope these next few days are more fruitful now that I've bought a straight cable and db9/25 adapter.

The good thing is that I managed to get the pi to recognize its new serial port. I also dusted off my DOS skills and my serial card in the 5150 seems to work.

I literally banged my head after nothing worked. Im hoping that the tx/ Rx is solved soon.

Oh and that AT to PS/2 adapter will allow me to use by IBM original Model M Keyboarf rather than the fun model F.

During my first semester of CS we were mostly using MatLab for basal scripting - assigning variables, learning about scope, that type of thing. I was excited to start learning programming but wanted to actually make something rather than reversing arrays and incrementing counters for weeks.

I discovered the image() function which takes a float[][] matrix and displays it as an image. I generated my arrays of random numbers and made a simple nested loop where I iterated over each element, averaging it with its neighbours, and - it worked on the first run! I made a freaking noise and blur filter!

That rush of planning it out, making it, and seeing it work I think is my main drive in coding. All the hours of undefined-but-they-are-tho import paths and mystery segfaults are worth it once there is that moment of "it lives!".

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.

so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.

BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.

and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.

and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.

autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.

in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.

upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.

at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.

remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.

it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...

it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.

and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.

it was a transcendental experience.

and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.

and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.

... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...

In an in-house beta our product was causing blue screens. We had some the crash reports and a I dug out the technical notes in how to decipher that gibberish. Still no real clue, but there was an address happened where it was supposed to happen. So I dumped our binary into two reversing tools, jumped to that address and looked at the surrounding code.
And sure there it was: A missing check when manipulating a C-string which could lead to out of bound access. Added a check BSOD's gone.

Personal Observation
=======
Today morning I was looking through different React UI frameworks for my next hobby project. MUI React has been my favorite but I wanted something informal for this project, so I opened up all the two dozen suggested ones by Google searches.

Since reversing on committing to a UI framework, later on, is a huge headache so I was going through the component demos to shortlist a handful for final consideration, and in that, I almost skipped out all the frameworks which weren't showing a preview of their component on the documentation page itself.
========
I wonder how many frameworks are genuinely good but are passed over due to others having better and more illustrative documentation. In a market with vast abundance, one cannot rely on the sincerity of the consumer to invest time and determine the best possible product, for there are plenty of 'good enough' products that the user does not really worry about false negatives.

I decided to change the theme of my app to dark, apparently what I did was just reversing the colors throughout the app. So basically my only change was in the build.gradle file and layouts. I have received 6 bug report so far that the previous version worked well than the current version don't do so so functions. Now I am living in self denial.

Don't you love it when your CSS has two equally valid positions so doing and then reversing a DOM manipulation leaves the site in a mess?

Hackerman strikes back. Always thought the new knowledge about stego tools, reversing, enumeration, privesc were just my private amusement. But could now use it, hopefully resolving a severe crash by dropping our binary into radare2 (cutter) and ghidra, identifying some dangerous code.

Also it gives you new angles to look at things. E.g. the vectors your code might expose...

Keeping the part time offer of my current job to continue doing school full time, instead of reversing that and not having to pay for school

Im going to shove their soapy WordPress plugin up their ass sideways.

Just had to reverse engineer a WordPress plugin communicating with a SOAP API.
Why? Because the stupid fucking retard company thinks "we do not support custom integrations at this time, only plugins for certain CMS and some external providers" IS IN ANY WAY AN OK THING? IT IS NOT.

And i am feeling ashamed for having purchased a WordPress plugin (100 bucks) just for reversing it. My server even has to Report to them as wordpress to get access.

So fucking typical for swiss companies

Edit: also, they state they DO support custom integrations on their main website :/

Today I'm starting interviewcamp.io. I graduated from a 4-year university in California with a degree in computer engineering and have almost 3 years of work experience, but my god I am terrible at algorithms.

Big O (time and space complexity), recursion, Binary Search Trees, reversing a fucking linked list, etc. I need the boost and I hope the $250 a year for the material will help me get at least a $5k increase in salary when jumping to another company after the whole pandemic (or get a raise at my current job).

If anyone has any experience with them let me know. So far I'm 2 hours in and it is nice so far.