Hacking: The Good, The Bad, and The Personal

According to Paul Gil, a hacker is a technically-savvy computer user, who for either negative or positive motivations, will manipulate and break into computer systems, hacking. There are three types of hackers: Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat. Black hat hackers are criminals; hacking into systems to create chaos and/or steal private information. White hat hackers are “ethical” criminals; since they get paid to use their ability to hack into computers/systems, they are not motivated to use their skills to steal private information. Grey hat hackers hack as a hobby, committing “minor” crimes (compared to black hat hackers) such as cracking software or copyright to share the files online.

Growing-up I wanted to be a black hat hacker (of course I didn’t know this term back then), I wanted to break into my friends’ computers and scare them by manipulating their cursor (I know what your thinking…but back then it seemed funny). In the minds of preteens, hacking and Computer Science go hand in hand. Whenever I went to talk to middle school students about my college career the first question they ask is: have I hacked something? Nowadays, there still exists the allure of hacking into systems just for the act of hacking.

Open Source: Opening the Future

Open source software refers to software whose source code is available to the public community. The community can modify and/or improve the software’s functionality by changing the source code. Open source promotes a very important concept to the people that use it; that concept is collaboration. Through collaboration the community improves the software and thus benefits the entire community not just the individual(s) that made the changes to the source code. On the opposite side of the spectrum, close source software is software whose source code can only be altered by its creator (i.e. a company or author(s)). You can find more information here about open source software.

Open source software is a great asset no matter what the level of experience a developer has. Beginner software developer can use the source code from open source software to learn and improve their programming skills. For a veteran software developer, open source software is useful because they can modify the software to fit their more advanced needs. Robin Muilwijk reports that Andy Hunt stated in an interview how open source is becoming more and more common in industry. Although it was referred to in the past, using open source software has become normal (even almost expected). 

Agile: Effective Tool with a Possible Weakness

Agile is a methodology that incorporates old practices used in software development projects (and other businesses). The resulting methodology has the potential to decrease the time and ultimately the money needed to complete a project. This methodology also allows for more creativity and flexibility from the teams that are following this practice because they are not as harshly bound to a set plan, as other methodologies require. The Agile methodology allows for flexibility because the customer is part of the project development process (compared to other practices where the customer is only a part of the process at the beginning and the end); thus if changes in requirements arise teams can deal with them while they are small instead of at the end when the project is “finish” and the changes have become large and difficult.

With all its positive aspects, Agile has a possible Achilles’ heel and it is this possible weakness that makes Agile such a great tool to use in businesses. Agile works under the assumption that teams do not need “strict” supervision, which improves creativity and decreases needed resources. For a discipline team that can supervise itself, Agile is perfect for them. However for those that are not as disciplined, such as those new to their field, Agile could lead to struggles to complete projects, met deadlines or even failure.