Main work

management ._. . Not really related with IT work, but my company seels stuff sometimes related to it... And i'm looking out that the requested stuff is being done here, basically. very tedious and painful thing to do at times... but it's no brainer and paid well-ish, so...

But, obviously, I did programming and system administration on freelance in parallel for a long ass time. Even though most of the time it was basically for crumbs, 'cause it was merely an excuse for me to keep up to date to all the bullshit collective engineering society had come to in a proffessional setting... but there were long standing notable exceptions along the way I wish I would kept working on, but, unfortunately, combined strike of yet another "complicated economical situation" and getting very busy on the main job, combined with mine slowly but steadily degrading health made such further endeavours... practically impossible... Uhhh... Aaanyway...

General hobby, forum help, freelance, etc.

• Good: System administration, server administration
  • Prefer linux. Hot take: you should never expose windows to the public internet.
  • Can live purely in remote ssh session the whole day, for weeks
  • Tend to only use pubkey-based ssh auth.
  • Prefer manual updates, at least i can check that everything had updated correctly.
    For enterprise-seiousness you can have test-subject copy of your live enviroment that you would update from a stable upstream first, to check that nothing will break, then download updates during a day, and schedule an actual update at night when the service is offline temporarily.
  • Debian and ubuntu server with snap disabled. Very rarely alpine (mostly in vms/containers) and once touched redhat enterprise and it... uuuh... was a very weird experience...
  • I can kinda work with windows, but again i would prefer to put some LTSC version in a vm with no internet access or hard great firewall if possible and required
• Good-okay: System programming and a bit of the embedded programming
  • Have a lot of unorthodox but actually simpler ways to do windows-linux corssplatform stuff (mingw my goat) + custom formatting based on vfprintf musl's libc source code + etc.
  • Prefer C, sometimesmust do C++, either 'cause of ABI or 'cause that's what the project is written in.
  • Hate Microsoft Visual Studio with my entire soul, sometimes being nostaligic about pre 2010 editions (at least they fuckign work, even though non-standard conforming as hell)
• Medium skill: postgres, sqlite. Setup, usage, and best practicies. Including API binding for sqlite. With postgress it's much more complicated due to server-client madness nature.
• Slight-ish: backend programming. Depending on the project and the language it can be very painful, mostly painful. If i'm starting from scratch it is slightly better but then everyone is mad at me because :
  • i ain't using those frameworks and libraries with 50 stars and one contributor on github that is inactive for three years.
  • and also mad 'cause I ain't doing ze "server-side rendering" whatevers.
    (brother your whole website's assets don't even reach 1 GB combined, you can just "pre-render" it all and serve as files trough ngnix stop making your life a hell for yourself with slow ass calls to fucking nodejs what is WRONG with you all????)
• Basic reverse engineering, altough it's a slow process, generally... Especially on the embedded dumps... But for easy to medium tasks i can do it. Anything where the instruction flow is obfuscated hard with vitual machines and crap is much much more unbearable for me though...
  But even there i can still do basic behavioural analysis...
  

  I wish in some spare time to just write my tooling... cause all reverse-enginnering "studios" suck, generally. IDA does a lot of magic behind the scenes but when that magic breaks hard you pull your hair out. Shall i say IDA still cannot properly reverse Delphi code? Nor does Ghidra? And generally anything optimized too bad and all those "magic" tools break at varying levels of badness that you just need to read assembly in the end anyway?
  And also like NONE of those, nor Ghidra, nor IDA, nor whatever else you bring on can really do any attempt at proper automatic struct guessing whatever by offsets and used methods... it always breaks in funny ways... And i am silent that both straignt up ignore that the given function can procude side-effects that are not accounted for in the currently produced disassembly and functions signatures and whatnot... it just makes it all very annoying and error-prone especially when you need SPECIFICS of how it all works... At the very least they can read a fucking debug symbols semi-properly so you can check what madness did clang compiler dumped on you to deal with...
  Am i mad about it? How did'ya guessed????

Programming languages, sorted by best to can program slowly on with a refmanual

1. Pure C - my goat.
2. C++ (..11-17) - annoying a bit, but can work with it when no template SFINAE type-loopholes shenanigan hells are in my way
3. Scripting: Lua (5.1-luajit-5.4): embedding lua into the native application and writing arbitaty complicated custom logic in it
4. Scripting: Python 3: simple backends, quick automation, etc.
5. Scripting: Bash: quick automation of bulk of commands, can kinda read it, but prefer not to use heavily (it is buggy and non-intuitive in some cases)
6. C#... it's a love-hate, mostly to hate, because M$ sucks as always... it's okay language with suck-ish slow-ish tooling. I can support old codebases / reversed codebase with a proper IDE no issues, except slow ass compiling times.
7. Golang: low, medium, high load backends. Didn't used it for long so kinda tend forget the syntax a lot, but for backends it is the best thing simply by the language design, architecture and perfomance.
8. Medium skill: postgres, sqlite. Setup, usage, and best practicies... with postgres it's a little harder 'cause it is a mess on the migration backup side so i usually just do a text-dump backups... it's more sane this way, trust me
9. Nginx, systemd: setup once carefully a bit with a refman then don't give af level.
10. Javascript... Oh i do NOT like javascript, especially modern one, but sometimes you need interactivity, so... I can do it... language and tooling just sucks, especially when old-browser compataility is taken in mind... You can take html and css to the same camp. Altough I'm not good at css per-se, but have a relative understanding of some very basic things...
11. Forth. I want very hard to eventually do something with it to accustom with it better. Apart from that i am only familiar with inner-workings of the forth systems: dictionaries, segments, compiler vs. interpreter mode etc.
12. Pascal/Delphi. Was the first programming language of mine and i have a lot of nostaligic memories about it, apart from that i hardly rememebr enything, especially considering how OLD compiler version i was using... And i forgot basically the majority of standard library functions and stuff... but in theory nothing is stoping me from speedrunning some refmans to remind myself of everything long forgotten, so...
    Just for reference of how weird and unorthodox my delphi experience was, just one name drop: KOL