Congratulations!!

Having a reverse engineering research focused conference on the US east coast is what we've been missing! Shout out to @psifertex.bsky.social, @peterlafosse.bsky.social , and the rest of the Vector 35 team for pulling this off. 💪

And that doesn't even cover all the stuff I've learned at $WORK!

So, how do you approach side projects and balance your time between work, them, and everything else?

I'm looking forward to 2025 being the year I finish more projects! 🥂

But despite a lack of public artifacts, I learned a ton, mostly about JavaScript and modern CSS (I started in the XHTML days 👴), but also Swift, protobuf and Java reverse engineering, extending pycrate, search indexing, Python Async, and SvelteKit. 6/

Imaginary users in my head are likely not even close to real users. That's why getting to even just a beta release of projects is crucial for me to level-set. 5/

I love the craft for the craft's sake but it's not particularly conducive for productivity.

Additionally, I want to work on things me and others would want to use. This makes it even more challenging to pick and release projects as I don't know what people will think. 4/

Unfortunately that means only FlagFinder is finished. This year I want to finish what I've started so I can freely work on new side projects. For me, getting things over the finish line is difficult due to my perfectionist tendencies when it comes to software. 3/

FlagFinder to search flags by appearance (colors, features, shapes), my first use of ChatGPT APIs, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. DB, a SvelteKit based game item viewer, and finally a tool to download Android OTA chains from Google APIs.

My definition of finished is "released to the public" 2/