Reading this makes me miss the early days of learning to program. I would reverse engineer games that I enjoyed and write hacks for them. I spent hours and hours every night staring at ASM and network data. Man, how I'd love to somehow be able to get paid to reverse engineer games all days.<p>Edited to include funny sample. It was literally a hack to make the chat client better. How nerdy was/am I? Hah: <a href="https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-chat-enhancements/blob/master/asm.cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-chat-enhancements/blob/...</a>
Anyone unfamiliar with Mr. Chen might enjoy Joel's article. The first time I read it the bits from/about Chen definitely left a lasting impression:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html</a>
Genuinely hard to express how seeing this made me feel -- particularly on a day of coincidental turmoil for Windows & MS. (I was a developer & dev lead on MS Money long ago, and clearly remember dragging him over for extended nighttime in-person kd stack-unwinding sessions.) He was so generous to our efforts to make that product a good one, and his electric, unstoppably curious, just-get-it-right combination of deep skill, energy, & attention to customers still totally inspires.<p>Be as much like him as possible. Necktie optional.
MS Money is a great product for simple home use. THough it seems with some new features the program went a little cock-eyed and some of the nice simple tasks became harder, but it was still a great tool (i have no money these days, so no longer have a need to use it)..<p>For all interested, here is the link to download the latest version for free.
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=20738" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=2073...</a>
this should be forwarded to all the douches that call themselves hackers ... this is what hacking is.
P.S. I am nowhere near this level but again I don't call myself a hacker just a coder.
Can anyone who works at MSFT explain why Raymond Chen wouldn't have access to the source of MS Money? Code doesn't compile on modern compilers? Written in an obscure language? They've lost the code? Company is so siloed that no one from another dept is allowed to see the code?
For the extra challenge put the code in the data fed to the program, causing a stack overflow and make it run the code that makes everything nice again!