What I Learned This Year - 2021
Introduction
Third year, third post, to follow up on 2019 and 2020. I tried restricting my reddit and hacker news reflex with LecchBlock, then I noticed I’d leave it disabled for days at a time, but it did help break the habit. Also this year I didn’t read as many technical write-ups, and instead read more stuff on soft skills. With my new position I’m learning a lot on the job already, so I most of my free reading was about the meta of being in tech.
Articles
growth.design Case Studies: In-depth looks at good and bad attempts as growth.
A worry junior engineers and new hires frequently have is that they ask too many questions.: A good way to ask questions as a junior developer, along with how to encourage it.
Against 3X Speed: Listening to speed-up books, podcasts, and lectures to try and cram the information isn’t worth it.
Bye CUPS: Printing with netcat: Sending a file to a printer via it’s IP address and netcat.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Walk
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” ― Søren Kierkegaard
Efficiency is the Enemy: By trying to work 100% of the time, you actually end up doing less.
Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspective: Phone data collection device used by law enforcement allows for arbitrary code execution.
Free for developers: Also this similar site, and both are better versions of my attempt.
I automated some XO / TOC tasks: A high-speed soldier’s project to automatically submit trip tickets Trip Tickets.
I created a fake company to play around with spammers: Like Lenny but for emails.
I have never seen an elite do this: A game modder explains the script of a Halo 2 easter egg from when they decompiled it.
I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won’t use it: It’s like Tinder, but for movies.
We’ve entered Inverse Moore’s Law: every two years single core performance drops 20% as optimization exploits are mitigated.
Leadership Soft Skills: Master Your Own Mind to Lead Your Team to Success: Common shortcomings and fixes to address them.
Mistakes I’ve Made as an Enginering manager:
- Thinking people give feedback the way they want to receive it
- Trying to do everything yourself as a manager is the best way to help
- Communicating something one time is enough
- You have to have everything together all the time
molly-guard: A guard to prevent triggering a Big Red Switch, either by mistake or from ignorance.
Netcode: Explaining how fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode: How fighting games use a different method for online netcode compared to other multiplayer games. See this and this related videos.
new codebase, who dis? (How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase):
- Locate the portion of code most relevant to the immediate task at hand.
- Understand that code enough to form a hypothesis about the change you need to make.
- Make that change and test your hypothesis. Sometimes the best way will be to click around in the UI or run a particular script. Sometimes the easiest path is to write a test that describes the behavior you’re after.
- If your hypothesis was incorrect, return to step 2. Understand why that change didn’t do what you thought it would, and develop a new hypothesis.
- Once you have working code, improve its quality. Write a test (or a few) that document the changes in behavior you made. Refactor your code for clarity and style.
on: The computers rejecting job applications:
The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against the hiring AI. You’d have the system generate your resume and application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on. In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly explain why their resume is a recipe for carne asada, an excerpt from Moby Dick, and a bunch of windings. But supposedly it’s predicted to increase final offer salary by 13.54%, so nobody questions it. Anybody who still writes out their resume by hand is considered a luddite weirdo, and definitely not someone you’d want to have join your company.
Print a WiFi Login Card: Generate a QR code to join a WiFi network.
The Tao of Backup: The best practices for data backups, told in a narrative format, to help promote the worldwide holiday.
Teaching Students how to Cheat During the Pandemic: Encouraging students on how to cheat, to understand how to imagine threats from adversarial perspectives.
This is inside the TF2 game files as “coconut.jpg”. Why: It’s in the title, along with this discussion about it.
This military graphic on electronic warfare should give everyone nightmares: The unique, and somewhat disturbing aspects, of military design-by-committee effects, also known as Armageddon Charts.
What’s the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell?: The history behind the pedantic semantics.
Why All My Servers Have an 8GB Empty File: A simple hack to prevent full disc errors.
Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?: The explanation (and fix) for a timed based easter egg.
Write a letter to the future you: I’ve been using this regularly for the past three years, and it’s a great way to see how much you change each year.
Pics and Posts
How long to hard-boil an egg? [duplicate]
i made doge in like 2 hours i didn’t consider anything
our github bot just got a job offer
Sorry for rushing this a bit, but got home yet?
Videos
How Pakistan Broke YouTube Globally for Two Hours
The KGB, The Computer, and Me (Clifford Stoll: The Cuckoo’s Egg)
The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken