My story: Overcoming Learning Challenges to Pursue a Passion for Hacking

My parents were both teachers and most of my schoolmates’ parents were teachers too. My buddies?were very smart and learned things very quickly. Yet, during pre-school, my parents were told I wasn’t a fast learner and in fact was having difficulties in learning how to read.

But I guess first things first.. Let me try and go back to remembering exactly how I got started.

When I was a kid, I don’t remember exactly what age, I saw a news report about computer hackers. On this report, I remember seeing a man with his face covered talking about what he did and how he enjoyed always finding “holes” in?computer “defence” systems. What struck me the most was that he said hacking wasn’t about being smarter than everyone else and that anyone really, with the right knowledge and enough persistence, could find these holes and exploit such systems. This strongly appealed to me since I was convinced I wasn’t the brightest of kids, but I sure was stubborn which I could probably bend into persistence.?

But I guess the story goes even further back?in time. When I was a kid my grandfather bought a ZX-Spectrum computer. It was the first computer my family had. He introduced me to the computer and encouraged me to learn programming to create programs for it. I wasn’t very interested in the programming part at all but the games were awesome. I would start the computer, load up a game and would play on it for hours in a row. I battled my sister on Chuckie Egg.?

In 1990 my father bought a PC. It was a bit more powerful and the games were much better. Then somewhere between 1990 and 1994 the Internet arrived at my house. It was the start of a new era for me and many of the kids of my generation. Suddenly, we could go online and speak with others on mIRC and consult webpages. IRC was the first online community I joined and the one that resonated with me the most. The fact that a bunch of people (many of them teenagers like me) were there whenever I wanted was great. It was like hanging out in a club where I could talk with friends and making new friends all the time. People on IRC were organised in channels based on interests or geography and any subject really. I joined my hometown channel and a few more. On my hometown channel someone started organising dinner parties in real life and these grew from a few to dozen people to eventually hundreds. It was a real blast. Each person had an avatar nickname and we would call each other by our nicknames. Mine was “Gotcha”, named after a branded hat I used to hear in real life when I was out.

I became very knowledge about computers and would surf the Web for hours on different subjects. I saw the Internet growing as well with new webshop, communities, technologies and games appearing every day.?

Together with that news report and the Internet I decided I would like to become a hacker.?

So I started studying it on my own and joining hacking communities. Playing hacking games, making acquaintances with other hacker wannabes and eventually some very knowledgeable hackers as well (mostly kids but they?had a surprising amount of experience already).

At one point I even joined a hacking group, which was great because was in a place where my skills were recognised and also where I could learn from others. We hacked into servers and defaced websites but most of the time we spent chatting and reading and trying out exploits and stuff.?

Some of those friends were in America so they wouldn’t come online until late in the evening so I would normally stay up until late in the morning. Boy, those were the days. Around midnight to 1am my parents would go to sleep and I had the house all to myself. The quietness to focus on the stuff I wanted to do and the comfort of a laid-back recliner chair where I would put up my feet and glaze at the perfectly level computer screen that was fitted perfectly, at eye level, in front of me. I began learning about Linux and Unix based systems, which are widely used for hosting websites. When I first installed Linux I erased all my computer’s hard drive by mistake. The first time I used Linux to get online a fellow hacker friend that hang around IRC was able to hack my PC and make a remote connection to it and log into it. I was hacked but it felt amazing people could do stuff like that. That’s what I wanted to do as well.?

I liked hacking and all but I didn’t know yet what I wanted to pursue in life professionally. After 9th grade we had to choose between pursuing General Sciences, Humanities and Liberal Arts, Technology or Economy. My father signed me up for Technology. He reckoned since I spent so much time at the computer I probably liked technology enough to pursue it as a career.?

During those years (between 1996-1998) I started learning about programming and technology in general and enjoying school more. Suddenly I found myself having better results than most. It seems spending the first few years of school in such a good class had finally paid off because now I could shine. And I’m a Leo; I need my shine.?

I still had the hacker thing in mind though and now I wanted to become the best and study hard so I could apply to the best technology college and learn all the skills that could lead me to become a really great hacker. I wasn’t very bright as a student though and had extra classes in Math, Physics and even Portuguese literature. In my extra time I was a swimmer and trained regularly and competed.?

I got in at évora University. évora is a world heritage historical center city that lives mostly off agriculture, farming and its University. Many of the teachers are also teachers in Lisbon and lectured there a few days a week.?

Since the bit that interested me the most was hacking (in the sense of knowing very well how systems worked so I could break them) I was different to many of my university mates who really enjoyed at least one main area of computer science – like programming, artificial intelligence, computer networks or game development. Still, I studied and learned as much as I could in all these areas, adding bits and pieces to my hacker toolkit as I went along. I learned more about Linux and the terminal along the way.?

Around my third year in college, I began thinking although I wanted to be a hacker I didn’t want to be a criminal for a living. The options then seemed to be working in computer security, setting up firewalls and configuring servers and stuff like that, more on the boring side of things rather than the attacking/breaking systems side.?

I also came across the more idealist version of what hacking means – through the open-source software movement – and became more involved in that through the Linux community. It seems working and contributing to Linux was the stuff real hackers were doing and developing the Linux kernel was the ultimate hacking activity. I participated in the Linux community and organized “Linux installation parties” where I would help others install Linux on their computers and become part of its community. I was still into computer security but it became more of a hobby where I would write a Linux kernel module or play around a particular exploit someone else had released and published online.?

As I progressed into my degree, I explored more subjects and became more prolific in programming in different languages and paradigms.?

I liked learning about computer networks, operating systems and the sorts but at some point we started learning how to create database-driven Web applications, I.e. software that would run on the browser. This was quite fascinating for me because it involved both playing with Web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) that I liked because I felt like I was building part of the Internet and also backend programming languages like Java, PHP, Perl, Python and later on Ruby that were full-featured programming languages that could be used to build pretty much anything really. They were also fun and easy to hack.?

I started learning about frameworks to create such applications and different possibilities of organising code and different technologies that could be joined together to build such things.?

This was also the time when blogging became big. People were journalling their thoughts and lives into blogs like crazy and it was quite fun to follow them and read about what everyone was up to. It was around 2003 when I first came across WordPress, and I used it to create a blog for myself and try this blogging thing – since everyone else was doing it too.?

I wasn’t much of a blogger and I struggled to write. Many times I wanted to write a great story rather than talk about what was going on with me. But I wasn’t a writer either so it never almost happened.?

At that time I also made acquaintance with a young freshman (Paulo André) that had entered computer science as well. He was a hacker at heart and wanted ferociously to learn everything there was about Linux, kernel hacking and pretty much every programming language he could get his hands on.?

Another two years passed and I was about to end my degree. By that time I was no longer into hacking as such and instead was focusing on working out?what to do with my life.

My friend and I were both reading Paul Graham’s book “Hackers & Painters” and one day, while chatting online, he was the first to suggest I should think about “creating a job” rather than finding one. And that we could even think of starting a company together with more friends from Uni. That really sounded good! What attracted us was the possibility of working on stuff we liked and dictating our own terms, our own rules and systems, etc.?

We started working on assembling a team and trying to figure out what we would do. He invited a person to the team and I invited another. Then the person he invited asked another friend and suddenly there were 5 of us. It was a star team, except for the fact we didn’t know what we were going to do. We brainstormed ideas around but we never reached agreement. There were areas of research some wanted to pursue, others that were agnostic and I had no clue.

While we were in this process three things happened that I regret. First I tried to invite a 6th person to the team because he was a great guy and close friend and my roommate (that’s not the only reason I invited him but rather because he was very knowledgeable and a hacker at heart too). Some bad communication on my part led him to believe he would be accepted, but the group rejected him on the grounds that there were already too many of us. So I had to tell my buddy that he couldn’t join and that broke my heart because I felt I was betraying him and I liked him so much.?

The second thing was that an acquaintance of mine contacted me to build a website for another business and I told him “sure thing” convinced the rest of the guys would like the idea of having a first gig to work on. But I was wrong – they didn’t want to work on the project – they wanted to pursue their own goals and areas of interest and building websites just wasn’t on their list. So I had to tell this potential customer that after all we wouldn’t be taking his project.?

The third thing was that internal wars started to crop up. Some thought what I did to be inconsiderate of them and accused me of not being on the same page. I later came to realize they were right – but at the time I felt rejected and angry. I thought about quitting the team and doing something else. Meanwhile my friend that had started the idea with me sent everyone an email where he announced he would be leaving due to the current state of affairs. With him leaving there just wasn’t anyone else that wanted to step up so it all came to an end. My first startup had died even before we had really started any business! That was very upsetting to me (for all the reasons above and the emotional turmoil it involved) but the truth is that the experience left something in me – the idea of “creating a job” rather than finding one.

(to be continued..)