[saurik]

ahem Actually, I wrote the first .NET decompiler: Exemplar, with a GUI later called Anakrino; it was even quite popular. Microsoft actually used it as a test case for their compiler occasionally. ;P Reflector existed at the time, but it was not a decompiler: it was just a class browser and disassembler. He added the decompilation features due to pressure from Anakrino, to which I was adding class browser functionality (and was orders of magnitudes faster, as I hated waiting around for Reflector to analyze the binary, which used to take forever). (Incidentally, Anakrino was open source.)

[cfn]

I remember using Anakrino! That was a loong time ago and thanks for doing it. What happened?

[saurik]

To be totally honest, I think the most correct answer to "what happened?" is simply "I was 18" (maybe 19). There are a ton of other aspects to the story that involve a lot of political backstabbing (crossing even unto seemingly unrelated projects that were actually related through different means), but I now know that is "par for the course" (sadly), and were I to be me now back then you'd probably still be using Anakrino today.

[teyc]

did you work for another company then?

[saurik]

I am confused. At the time I wrote Anakrino I was a freshman (maybe a sophomore) at the College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. I did not have a job at that time: I wrote Exemplar over a weekend while visiting home to prove a point on the .NET beta mailing list (that decompilers would happen sooner, rather than later), and then wrote Anakrino to make it easier to use.

I had previously had jobs, but I had moved on as I went to college; back home, I had been working with/for a friend of mine, Patrick Dietzen, on a web design and consulting company, CyberUniverse, which he had started when he was a freshman in high school (he had to explain to his clients what the Internet was), and then (for a brief time) for one of our clients, Professional Response and Consulting, Inc., during that last summer.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, a friend of mine decided to take something I had been helping him with a few months prior (a video game he had been working on for many many years) and attempt to start a company with it, registering for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Engineering Management annual business plan competition: I was one of the people who worked with him on that project.

[teyc]

You are clearly very capable. What are you doing now?

[saurik]

I run an alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iOS devices (specializing in everything that isn't actually an "app" at all) called Cydia; I am a member of the (probably poorly named) "iPhone Dev Team", the group that writes the popular jailbreak tools, but I really specialize in everything that happens "after the hack": acting as a sort of "community manager" for the ecosystem of users and developers, and coordinating the efforts of the various groups.

In addition to some of the popular tweaks, one thing in particular that I work on and am known for is called Cydia (Mobile) Substrate, a framework and development library used by developers to reasonably sanely (and hopefully safely) make modifications to code written by other developers and running in other processes, even if multiple people are attempting to modify the same thing; this library is the foundation of most of the interesting hacks found on the iPhone.

(I also give large numbers of talks at conferences about all of this, and so the previous two paragraphs are pretty much just me typing my introduction; if you search around on YouTube you can find me saying almost the exact same thing in numerous hilarious contexts. You might also find me "busting out an Xzibit", much to the chagrin of YouTube commenters everywhere, who also like to complain about my long beard and fingernails.)

[rao]

and then what happened?