[boricj]

I somehow keep falling into rabbit-hole projects that are deeply heretical in nature.

I've attempted a video game reverse-engineering/decompilation project and somehow ended up with a Ghidra extension that can export relocatable object files from a program selection. In other words, I can tear out pieces of a program and reuse them inside new programs willy-nilly, like how a mechanic can rip out parts from a car scrapyard and build Mad Max-style contraptions out of them. I've documented some of my achievements with that stuff on my blog, like making a native port of a proprietary Linux program to Windows without decompiling it or having access to its source code. These acts seem to give the vast majority of software developers a huge migraine, probably because they are impossible according to CS 101.

As a side-note, I've also managed to successfully perform a version tracking session with Ghidra from a source binary that doesn't exist, but that's a lesser sin in my opinion.

Lately, I wanted to get rid of a vintage network card in an old APC UPS and that somehow resulted in me attempting to stick a competitor's card in there. Not only that, but to do it in the most roundabout way possible: write a USB HID stack so that I can create a virtual power device, then write acquisitors that can get data from a UPS and puppeteer the virtual one and then write projectors to whatever communication protocol the card uses. It's a project that is still very early in development so I currently have nothing to show for it but a work-in-progress homegrown USB HID library.

It even seeps through in my professional work, because I'm the person that is air-dropped across teams onto a problem when everything else has failed. The magic words usually include "we need your dark magic" or "we're out of options" or "there's no one else to escalate to". Most of the time it's for debugging an elusive issue, but I've also built in a hurry contraptions that defy conventional software engineering but are somehow perfectly fit for purpose.