oof, exes... and fuck me the way that women have been scrambled in this last 50 years, seriously, they don't know their arse from their tits
Discussion
Every bit of the knowledge I accumulated in IT/CS was all thirst and self education via raw trial and error, elbowing and socially engineering my way into exclusive pockets where the old hats played, and sheer will. My first experience was kernel64, as a child, and I later entered serious acquisition circa 386/28-33mhz. Before sound cards, cd drives. AOL private rooms and Efnet were my classrooms. I get nostalgic remembering my first BO Hack victims, my first VB progs, my first nix compiles, first nmap scans.
I recently returned to community college to obtain CompTIA certs, the first of any proof I can provide of my accomplishments, and I must agree, the people I come across with ba/ma degrees and even simple certs, have next to no idea what they’re doing. I guess nothing trumps real world experience where it’s hack or starve, design or lose domicile, etc. Not to mention back then we did it for the love of the art, for bragging rights only a handful of people would understand… but I wouldn’t trade it…ever.
fuckin legend
i am of a similar cohort... i had a passion for it that was already visible to everyone when i was 4 years old
i didn't get back into programming for a long time - just doing tech support was a reasonable thing in the 00s but then 2012 i encountered bitcoin via the dark web via tor and after that it became a thing... and now i can code all kinds of cryptography and distributed systems stuff... but now i'm getting a bit old... and sick... better than i was but i really need something to reset my system right now
Love this man. Inspiring to see where the hard work and grind has taken you.
In college I specialized in Logistic warehousing systems and was always on the database side and building web interfaces. Never got into hacking much but know that pushing a system to its limits and knowing its weak points is a must.
For me the social network was always the biggest barrier to entry. It is all a big circle jerk club. The certificates and diplomas are only to justify why they hired the person, most likely they were already hired before the job posting went up.