Category: Journey

Why Apple?

If you were to poll many of the people that know me, you would quickly find out that I am super pro-apple products. An Apple fanboy if you will. But if you were to press them with the simple question of “why”, very few would know the truth.

My Apple obsession (if you will) started for me in High School when my parents first got me an iPhone, an iPhone 3G, which was later followed by the iPhone 4, then 5, then 6, and as I am sure you can guess, the pattern has continued to this day. The enjoyment of my iPhones continued to an even more expensive habit, as my devices transitioned from not just the phones, but moved to iPads, watches, and most importantly, laptops. To this day, the majority of my electronic devices are… you guessed it… Apple.

While my quick answer for why I love Apple might include responses like: “Ease of use”, “It just works”, “Everything works together seamlessly”, or some other response that you might hear from a typical Apple user, the real answer is a bit deeper.

My love for Apple started off as a genuine curiosity that has grown into shaping my passions and my career. Around the time when I first got my iOS device, the App Store was first making headway, giving the ability for software developers of all ages and backgrounds to put custom applications on a mobile device. Before the App Store and iPhones, there were smartphones like Palm Pilots and Blackberrys, where I would happily play Solitaire or Minesweeper on my parents’ phones. However, there was nothing to this extreme. When the App Store became popular, all I wanted to do was to make my own.

Not long after I received my first iPhone I became aware of the Jailbreak community, where unlocking my iPhone gave me the ability to both download and build my own custom tweaks and themes. It was a weekly thing where I would change my device to look the best or act the fastest or whatever else might have been popular in Cydia. I spent my time learning the basics of programming just to make some simple modifications to the UI or hack whatever game that I may have had downloaded on my phone during the time.

While being a part of the Jailbreak community may have been one of my favorite parts of my Apple fanhood, in reality, one of my primary goals was to build an app myself and put it on my phone. This, of course, means that I would need a Macbook so that I could download Xcode and use Objective-C, but until I was able to convince my parents that I absolutely needed the greatest and most expensive there was to offer, I used my laptop to learn the basics of programming and dreaming of the various things that I would build, all with the intentions of one day building my own app.

When the day came that I was so lucky to get my Mac, it was quite obvious what the first few things I would do were. After learning Objective C and identifying my first app idea (a story for a later time), I was off to the races. During the development, I began to encounter questions like: “How do I allow users to log in or create an account?”, “How do I share this information?”, “How do I store data?”, and other things that led to more questions than answers. These experiences and constant questions led my curiosity into a wild goose-chase that transformed my simple app idea into me learning the ins and outs of computer architecture, computer networking, computer security, software design, databases, and pretty much anything else I would need to actually make this idea come to life.

Along the process of building that first app and the various others that would follow, not only did I find ways to learn a wide variety of software engineering practices, but in general learned how to build systems. Much of what I learned on this path has played a role in what I do today as a software engineer, security researcher, and entrepreneur. Between building systems and solving complex problems, I had to start somewhere, and much of that ambition can be accredited to my love for Apple and the desire to build an app.

So why Apple? Well, outside of being just a regular fanboy, I guess you can say that they helped guide me to my passions of today. And for that, why would I stray away?

New Year, New Book(s)?

This year (2020), I set out to make an effort to start doing something I hadn’t really done much of before: read. To be fair, I read all of the time, but reading complete books is not something that has occurred extremely often. As a computer person, many of the things I read included online articles or blog posts about some technical feat or the latest news about technology or software I was interested in. As a self-described entrepreneur, I would find interest in reading anything that would help me get to the nest level from a business perspective, whether that was the latest software to help automate some part of the business or the newest strategies on how to gain customers or traffic or market your services. But that was about it.

One of the reasons I set out on this new journey was due to this frustration that I noticed within myself where I felt as though I was no longer learning about much of anything. Obviously, I might learn about the newest gadget or a new technique on how to approach and solve some technical problems. Hey, I even got really good at writing code in GoLang (my current favorite language), but I felt a lack of learning things of substance.

What may be more interesting about this idea is that reading has never really been my thing, unless it was something that I found extremely interesting. For example, in AP Language in High School, we were forced to read one of my favorite books, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. This book changed my perspective on reading as a whole and gave me my first experience with a book that I just couldn’t put down. However, outside of the few books from that class, reading remained a thing that needed to be done solely because it had to be. Often times, I would find a way to gain the necessary information without having to actually read the book at all. Especially in college, I spent more time finding and solving problems based on theories and algorithms than actually reading the books necessary (which may or may not have helped me, no idea). As a person who learns best by doing, this has always worked for me. However, now that I am interested in learning things that I can’t always just immediately apply, the struggle has been real.

A few months into this journey of intentionally reading, and I can say that I have never been more excited. Transitioning from reading primarily technical books and articles to whatever class of books I find myself reading now has actually begun to show me the importance of consistently reading, and why so many leaders (whether in business, politics, or just life as a whole) discuss the importance of reading daily. While I fully intend to write a post on many of the books that I have read and will continue to write as I read more, I think that finding a good list of books that I was immediately interested in was key to starting off my journey. While finding many books online that were highly suggested for either self-improvement or business growth and entrepreneurship, the set of books that I ended up starting with was suggested by @CVRLNE. I actually started the year off with The One Thing, which I think I have already told nearly everyone in my life about at least once and how excited I was to read it. A simple concept and mentality, but changed my approach entirely on how I approach a multitude of things in life.

As discussed in the book Atomic Habits, one of the key differences is how perspective. It has been interesting to see how my perspective on reading has transitioned from reading due to a requirement towards more of reading based on my own desires and interest. I will write more on the impacts some of my favorite books have had on me in a different post, but until then ✌🏽.

My Experience Teaching

For as long as I can remember, I knew that no matter what I ever did, I never wanted to be a teacher. Why? I have no clue.

Many people in my family have held the role of teacher. Ranging from my late grandmother who taught for her entire career, and even after she retired, my grandfather who taught college courses in Chemistry (a topic that still manages to escape me), to my aunt who started as an English teacher and worked her way up to currently being an amazing principal and periodically teaching college-level courses. Even my parents teach in their respective ways, as my mom periodically teaches classes in Church and my dad has been a basketball coach forever. It’s not a lack of respect either, as I hold the belief that teaching is one of the most important roles in a successful economy, and despite that fact somehow still manages to be the most underpaid and unappreciated role, at least here in America. All that to say, I have no idea where this lack of desire comes from, but it has existed for quite some time.

My first true experience, however, came my first semester in graduate school, when I found out that I would be the Graduate Teaching Assistant (and only TA) for Introduction to Computer Security for my advisor. I’m not 100% sure when the imposter syndrome hit, but when it did, it hit hard. This class is made up of mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate students, meaning that everyone was either my age or older. And while I did fine in the class when I took it myself, and I have been around security since forever, I just knew that the chances of people noticing that I didn’t know ish were everywhere. I was so sure that it would go bad and I’d be considered a bad TA and lose funding for school and the end of me was near, but then it wasn’t. Much to my surprise, not only was I pretty good but more so found a large amount of enjoyment in it.

While not delving into individual experiences, I quickly came to learn that teaching was something that I drew great pleasure from. Both times when I taught the course, it was filled with people who had a genuine interest in the course and the material, even though their experiences ranged from very, very beginner to some who I am sure are far more knowledgeable and skillful than me at this point. I was quick to realize though that whether or not I always knew the answer, it didn’t matter. Being able to answer questions quickly was cool at times, but it was the times where things just didn’t quite go as anticipated and the answers to questions were not quite as clear cut that truly challenged me, and made teaching the course fun. While I know I learned a ton of material in the course and had some great experiences (I can talk about that later, some pretty awesome stories), it was probably teaching the course again that truly helped me grasp the material.

Early on I was taught that the best way to learn any type of material is to try and teach it to someone else. You quickly learn what you don’t know if you are lacking in a specific area, and also grow much more comfortable while studying. (If you are interested in trying this, then I would suggest to take this a step further and try to explain it to someone who has very little knowledge and/or interest in the area. That challenge pushes you beyond what you might imagine.)

Most recently, I was granted the opportunity to teach a group of high schoolers mobile and web development. The goal: Help the group of 48 students build both an iOS application and a website for their overall project in the SEI program. The challenge: I had 5 sessions of about 2-3 hours each, and maybe a quarter of the students had any type of programming experience. The result: overwhelming success.

While I am uncertain what this means for me in the long term, what I can say is that teaching has transitioned from something that I dreaded to an experience that I have begun to look forward to.