Hook, Line and Sinker: How My Early Interests Got Me to Where I Am Today

Having an exciting software job at a newly-acquired company is opening up so many possibilities, and making possible the projects that I want to accomplish to make things better. Whether its big projects like containerizing our multiple apps for scalability, implementing Continuous Delivery to ship our software faster, or smaller projects like versioning our dependencies for traceability and ease of deployment, or updating to the latest Java version for performance improvements and to use all the new libraries; it’s nonstop fun that upgrades my problem solving skills, improves the lives of our team and customers, and gives me a track record of making positive change.

After finishing school I can focus more on teaching myself new skills and technologies that I can use and apply during my professional career. Currently I listen to DevOps and software podcasts when I’m traveling to places and I read a few articles about Docker and other technologies when I have free time. My next logical step is to start applying the knowledge I’ve gained both at work and as side projects.

At least it’s not all bad in the academia life: this fourth year Computer Security class that I’m taking is immensely fun. I’m glad that I have a captivating class this semester. I can give credit to the Security Now podcast for which I’ve listened to around 500 of its 543 episodes as of this writing (read: 10 years of listening!), for giving me the practical knowledge of current security practices and news, diving deep into the details where necessary.

Dr Anil Somayaji, the professor of the Computer Security course, is an excellent lecturer and a hacker at his roots. His interactive teaching style makes the possibly dry subject of security interesting (if you think of security as dry. Who would?), and his course work is very useful in that it promotes self teaching and helping out others. Each week every student must submit a hacking journal. It consists of the student writing about their adventures, frustrations, successes and failures of hacking on security related things – whether that involves using Metasploit to break into a computer, putting a backdoor into OpenSSH, figuring out how to configure a firewall, etc. The list goes on and on. An online chatroom is used to share resources and chat with other members of the class to figure out hacking problems and interact with the professor. (Other classes should definitely start using this)

I’m glad to have had the drive to explore and learn when I was young. Throughout my childhood I would spend my time hacking gaming consoles, jailbreaking iPods, experimenting with Linux, and most of all having a website! Not this website, there was a website before jonsimpson.ca. It was jonniesweb.com. I prominently remember creating logos for my website in MS Paint, printing them out and putting it up beside the Canadian flag that was posted in my fifth grade class. I would use MS Front Page 97 to add jokes, pictures, cheat codes, YouTube and Google Video links, games, and referrals to other friend’s Piczo sites. I remember going through a few designs: spaced themed, blue themed, red themed… I even got interested in PHP and used a sweet template. Each iteration improving with content and coding skills.

Then middle school and high school caught up with me and I stopped updating the website. Sooner or later my dad stopped supporting my hobby, eventually letting the web hosting expire.

Fast forward a few years and what was once a childhood interest has turned into an education and career choice. Building a website sparked the fire, pursuing a degree gave me the drive, and doing co-op (soon to be full-time) at work has shown me the many different problems to be solved.

My plan is to work my ass off in all of my classes, finish up my degree and follow my passions, utilizing my knowledge and expressing my solutions at both my job and in my blog. Ultimately trying to build a successful and happy career.

At the moment I’m just glad that I don’t have a crappy professor.