I write code for Humans & text for Robots
Hi!
My Name is Ibrahim, I write code for Humans.
In April in 2016, I joined a start-up. It was my very first, I didn't know the first thing about it. What I found exciting was the idea of bootstrapping every thing from the ground up. One year later, we were standing on the podium, presenting our start-up in the Techcrunch Disrupt Battlefield. It's a success, it's an experience, it is the source of great confusion. I would like to tell you how we got there and about the unexpected things that we learned along the way. tl;dr: If you want to know about our experience, you gonna have to read. Sorry
If you've used WordPress, then you know that it has a nice little folder called upload where all the pictures and videos you upload get stored. This is all fine and dandy, until people start accessing those assets.
This may not be relevant to most people but I just have to say it. I love perl.
A quick question. Do you need to know what Web Server I am running? Your answer is yes? I know, your answer is "I don't really care." Yes, I know you don't care, but I am sending you this information anyway with each web request.
4 years ago, I carved a little place on the web for myself. No, I did no create a new social media profile. I created a blog. This old thing in the age of videos, tweets, and one-click-create-a-website. I chose a medium that is being phased out by the mainstream, not intentionally, but because it made sense at the time. And here were are today reading it. This little place is the only place I have somewhat control of, so I will use it to tell you what has happened in the 4 year span.
I used MD5 as my password hashing back in the days (few years ago). I used it in combination with a salt and it was enough to secure the web applications I worked on at the time. Now, MD5 is broken. Not that the algorithm it used to generate one-way hashing was updated or is broken, but techniques have been developed to create the same hash using arbitrary input. Also, GPUs are powerful enough to brute force passwords. Ask Linked in about that. But the question now is, since we are all moving to more secure cryptographic methods to secure passwords, are there any uses left for good Old MD5?
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing.
If you've used WordPress, then you know that it has a nice little folder called upload where all the pictures and videos you upload get stored. This is all fine and dandy, until people start accessing those assets.
Ubuntu is one of my favorite OS. It is very user friendly, perfect for surfing the web, for music, for movies and even gaming. At the same time you have all the power of Linux behind it so I can use it for working on my projects. Recently, I bought a new laptop and unfortunately I found myself returning it because it was a just a giant hardware dongle.
Every little corner has a story. Sometimes a camera tells the story and a picture is worth a thousand words.
There are professional photographers and then there is me who happens to have a camera on my phone. Here's to what came out.
