Olivier Vroom
Welcome to my blog! Here you can find book/podcast/website reviews, my thoughts on random things, and anything else that I find interesting.
Welcome to my blog! Here you can find book/podcast/website reviews, my thoughts on random things, and anything else that I find interesting.
What is codewars.com?
I use codewars.com to keep expanding my knowledge of programming and programming languages in a fun and exciting way. Codewars is an educational community for programmers, where you can train yourself by solving various challenges (also called "challenges" or "katas"). The challenges are created by the community and are divided into different levels of difficulty. After you solve a challenge, you can compare your solution with the solutions of other programmers. It is impressive to see how different people solve the same challenge in their own creative and unique way. You can see my account and how I solved several challenges by clicking here: codewars.com/users/oliviervroom/.
Here is an example of an SQL challenge, try to solve it by yourself first before looking at the answer
For this challenge you need to create a simple SELECT statement that will return all columns from the products table, and join to the companies table so that you can return the company name.
products table schema:
id, name, isbn, company_id, price
companies table schema:
id, name
You should return all product fields as well as the company name as "company_name".
Solution:
SELECT products.*, companies.name AS company_name
FROM products
JOIN companies ON company_id=companies.id;
Beginning of traineeship
I started at Calco this Wednesday, along with 24 other new colleagues! Calco is a company that trains people without an IT background to become IT professionals. The first 3 days mainly consisted of getting acquainted and doing different types of exercises. Some exercises were more technical while others were aimed at improving our social and cooperation skills.
Visual basic
On Friday we started programming with Visual Basic, https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic, in the Microsoft Visual Studio environment. What I like about Visual Basic is that you can develop graphical applications in a visual way by manipulating elements through drag-and-drop, instead of having to program it manually. This makes it much more intuitive (and also more exciting) because you are quickly on your way to a having a functioning application. Furthermore, if you double click on an element, you will be taken directly to the snippet of code that controls the behavior of that element.
First programming assignment
Our first programming assignment was to build additional functionality on top of an existing application. The application is an administrative tool that lets you calculate how much each member of an association has to pay. Our task was to make it possible to calculate discounts for people who pay in 1 installment, and for people who are relatives of other members. Despite trying different approaches, I still couldn't get it to work. I wanted to run the program step by step to see exactly where it went wrong, but every time I started the program, it ran through all the lines of code right away. After a while of googling I came across the term “Breakpoint”. That was exactly what I was looking for! Breakpoints are often used to debug computer programs, i.e. to find out the cause of a bug. Setting up breakpoints allowed me to create "conditions", so that as soon as an important line of code is executed, the console receives a notification about it. That made me realize that the code snippet I had written wasn't running at all, so I could have spent all day programming and trying but still the program wouldn't work. By making a change to the program logic, I was able to get my code snippet to run, and after a few more changes, the new functionality worked. Although it is only a small addition, I am deeply proud of it.
My first week at Calco ended with a nice drink on the terrace in the sun, where I also got to know teachers and trainees from groups that started earlier. I've learned a lot in the past 3 days and look forward to continuing next week!
Hackable, the Podcast.
This podcast is about cybersecurity and how to protect yourself from criminals online.
You should keep in mind that the podcast is made by McAfee (a cybersecurity company) and that they promote their own software. Despite that, the podcast is pretty exciting because they often try to hack into their own colleagues or friends, to show how easy it can be to get hacked or phished. The podcast won the best sponsored podcast “shorty award” in 2018.
After listening to a few episodes I noticed that I opened my emails more carefully because basically any email could be a phishing attempt. I also notice that I am more cautious when trying to connect to a public WiFi network and that I now usually choose to just use my 4g data.
One idea from the podcast that I find particularly interesting is that hacking is almost more of a psychological activity than a technological activity. For example, hackers use “social engineering” to gain the trust of their victims. They do this by first getting some information about their victims. This allows them to send an email with some personal information to impersonate someone or a company, and then gain their victim's trust. Then it is much easier for the hacker to deceive and mislead the victim. This form of phishing is called “targeted phishing”. Targeted phishing and social engineering are apparently often more convenient than trying to hack directly through a firewall, because an IT system is just as vulnerable as the most vulnerable part of the system, and often the most vulnerable parts of a system are the people.
My current favorite episode:
Episode Number 36 GONE PHISHIN from 12/03/19.
I found this episode fascinating because they showed how just by sending an email, a hacker (from a distance) could take complete control over someone's computer.
I recommend this podcast, especially if you find it exciting to hear intense stories.
P.S.
If you want to know if you're being hacked, you can place 'honeypots' on your computer and in your cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc.). An example of a honeypot is a fake file that is attractive to hackers. For example, a Word document named "passwords.docx". Once that file is opened, you will receive an email notification. This works by placing digital tripwires, known as "Canary Tokens," in the document. Go to canarytokens.org to create Canary Tokens. You can learn more here by watching this video:
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
This book was recommended to me by a friend that studies biology. It talks about different philosophies in an attempt to understand and decipher what consciousness really is. I always had the feeling that the author was tiptoeing around the topic without ever truly coming to a solid explanation of how in the world it’s possible that physical matter like human or octopus brains can possibly become self-aware and conscious. I had hoped that he would come up with a simple and clear answer for this, but unfortunately it looks like nobody can come up with a solution to this mystery. Nonetheless, it was truly fascinating to hear the author recount his many vivid stories about his interactions with octopuses. In his words, they are the closest thing to aliens or extraterrestrial intelligent life that we have encountered, since their brains evolved on a separate evolutionary path than humans. I recommend this book to anyone interested in thinking about what it means to be alive and aware. Some points of the book go into very intricate details about the anatomy and biology of octopuses and cephalopods, so if you find that boring you might have to be prepared to skip some portions of the book.
Favorite quote:
“When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all.”
This is the first of (hopefully) many to come blog post. I was inspired by the author James Clear, whose book Atomic habits I am now reading (or actually listening to the audiobook from Audible.com) (jamesclear.com/atomic-habits). I have decided to commit to writing blog posts in an attempt to force myself to reflect on what I have done and what I want to do next. Another reason is that this is an experiment in acquiring new habits. I have frequently tried to get new good habits and get rid of bad habits but more often than not failed. Atomic habits gave me a different way to look at changing my life. One of the points that has stuck with me is the idea that it isn’t setting high goals which determines whether one is able to achieve success, instead it is about making many tiny changes in your daily routine (habits), and that over time you will drift towards success.