“So dude, do you know hacking?” asked my friend.

“See, that’s not how it works. A great deal of hacking depends on ….”. Nah! We didn’t really have that conversation. I just answered with a “No” because “Maybe” would’ve been harder to explain.

The Hollywood stereotype suggests that hacker is a nerd, wearing a hoodie, incessantly hitting keystrokes on his black–green screen (btw, you don’t really need to type so much since computers have had an ultra-convenient “Save File” feature since eternity). As technically ridiculous it is, I don’t normally lose my mind over it. The exasperating part of this stereotype is a misbelief that a hacker —

a) can take control of anything from someone’s telephone to national security servers.
b) has mastered a complex art to do every single thing.

News of websites getting vandalised, accounts getting hacked and photos getting leaked without the technical details simply reinforce the misbelief but the truth is that real-world hacking is much simpler than it seems — at least logically simple.

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My SaaS attempt didn’t work out. So another failure story? Should I write a bucket list of lessons to be learned, things that went wrong? Well, I could but honestly, there are no apparent reasons for it not working — I mean you could think of various issues but it’s hard to imagine if winding the clock back would put me in a better place about what I was trying — maybe it’ll or maybe it won’t. Here, ‘it’ refers to Blipmetrics, a SaaS application that I was trying to build for content marketers but I failed short of building any momentum with it. “It’s niche, it’s focused, that would have a visible impact on my success”, I thought but it didn’t carry much effect.

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We conceived the idea of “Bouncelytics” as a small analytics tool to help people understand their bounced visitors I saw many blogs mentioning how bounce rate wasn’t a useful metrics since it didn’t account for the time spent on the page. As lean guys, we set-up our landing page with what we were planning to build and posted it wherever we could. We got about 170+ sign-ups and we were terribly excited about having so many people interested in our product.

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For any marketer, tracking social performance is almost synonymous to evaluating social shares. We all know how the internet went crazy with the demise of Twitter Share Count API. The epicentre of sharing can be variety of sources but social media buttons still form a big part of how people share content from websites. Since the time unknown, Social Share Buttons, have served as tiny little widgets gently suggesting readers how the helpful content could be useful for their friends and acquaintances as well.

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Six years ago, I was taught my first lesson of C++. Soon after learning about loops, came a subsidiary lesson about the goto statement. The teacher made it clear that using goto was a horrible practice because of unconditional-jumps mess it creates and should always be avoided. A bit of googling followed and I ended up with a well known essay of E. Djikstra’s ‘Goto is considered harmful’ and I committed myself to never use the statement even if it meant creating a frivolous flag variable.

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For most of the times, debugging is easy – a silly logical error or an oversight, quick to correct and move on but some problems are hard – because you don’t know where it is wrong. The bigger the involved stack is, the higher are your chances of getting stuck at them. In such cases, tools like strace can be of great aid as they can help you give a hint about where things are getting screwed up.

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John Carmack once speculated that StackOverflow might have added billions in productivity.

@chx @jzy @StackExchange @codinghorror SO has probably added billions of dollars of value to the world in increased programmer productivity.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 17, 2013

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We’re living in an exciting century. The majority of today’s success stories trace its existence from few nerds hacking in their garage. Yet, majority of ambitious hackers, struggle to get going with any of the dozen of ideas that they have thought, most of which end up being un-fiddled in their favorite note-taking apps.

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Recently I completed my first game, Penguin Walk, with help of free art in Javascript and it gave me empirical experience of a known-fact surrounding game development – “The hardest thing about developing a game is finishing it.” Although, the game is dead simple and code runs in only few hundreds of lines, it took a lot of effort to finish it. The reason? I believe the hard thing related to game development, is that you are attempting to build something complex out of very simple elements (pixels).

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The notion of 10x programmer was first mentioned by John Brooks (of, Brook’s law fame) in his essay No Silver Bullet, according to which, ‘there is as much as a tenfold difference between an ordinary designer (programmer) and a great one’. The idea has been widely debated, sometimes refuted and many times defended which is unsurprising for it is impossible to accurately measure a programmer’s productivity.

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