About
Welcome to my personal blog. I am a software engineer living in France, and I worked in the entertainment industry for 11 years before joining botify.com to passionately work with Go and genuinely nice and smart people. My work there is mostly about building systems to manage traffic and render webpages at scale, and I love it.
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All opinions expressed here are my own and blah blah.
Got time for a story?
My father was a biologist, but really, he was a computer nerd. He would use assembly to make fireworks explode on the screen, and that was “for the lulz”. I cannot do this. As far as I can remember, I always have been around computers. As a kid, I had access to every software/game I could dream of, all cracked, of course.
When I was 12, I told my father I would like to understand how software worked; and he did something that may seem unconventional nowadays. He loaded windasm and winhex on my computer, along with some crappy image editor shareware. Can you see where this is going? Yup. We sat down and he explained me how to crack it — find out the address of that conditional jump right before that “license key ok” message, and change it to as many NOPs 0x90 as needed in winhex. Then run it, and see for yourself if that worked out. Such a vivid memory. There’s some moments in life you never get back, and this is one of them for me.
It blew my mind to see how a software could be tricked into doing something it was specifically designed not to do. So much that I asked for some more, and it became my favorite puzzle game for a few weeks. I then asked my father how to actually build software - and I got a cracked copy of Visual Basic, pro edition. Never stopped from there. I mean, not Visual Basic, but you get the idea.
More than 20 years later, I still look back at this story as the foundation of my passion and career. Thank you, dad.
Now, I’m a dad too. And I am the computer nerd frantically laughing at some dumb thing I made.