HACK Chief Architect Libraries

Hello, and welcome to the first ever episode of "Hacking the Org", a brand new podcast from the WTF is Cloud Native team here at Container Solutions. With this podcast, we're aiming to bring together some of the most experienced software engineering leaders and talk to them about their experiences covering topics such as building and leading high-performing software engineering teams. I'm Charles Humble, Container Solutions' editor in chief, and I'm joined today by Randy Shoup. Randy has spent more than two decades building distributed systems in high-performing teams and has worked as a senior technology leader at high profile firms, including eBay, Google and Stitch Fix. He coaches CTOs, advises companies and is a regular conference speaker. He is currently VP engineering and chief architect at eBay. Randy, welcome to the show.

HACK Chief Architect Libraries

Like you mentioned, I'm the chief architect and I'm the VP of engineering for what we call internally, engineering ecosystem and experience. And that's a big old mouthful but just think the developer experience. eBay has on the order of 4,000 engineers and my teams build the developer frameworks, the CI/CD pipelines, the environments where people do development, staging, et cetera. We do the mobile foundations and actually, we're also responsible for the external APIs that third-party developers use to help our buyers and sellers interact with eBay. But yeah, you can just broadly think of it as the developer experience part of eBay.

But what became very clear was that the bottleneck, so think theory of constraints for your listeners that know lean, the bottleneck was absolutely in the software delivery area. On average, the average one of those 4,000 applications and services was deploying once or twice a month. And so there's a lot of things upstream I want to change about the architecture. I have this chief architect title and you'd think that I'd come in and like "Let's make all these architectural changes." And believe me want to, but the open and honest truth is that you can't change the architecture if you only have 12 bites at the apple every year, if that makes any sense, right?

Our chief architect created a C++ library that is intended as a "runtime" for our domain of work (they are really several libs - think sdl, sdl_net, sdl_ttf, however with an C++ interface, and they always should be used altogether, even if you might need only one of them).

"With semi-transparent floors made of steel grating and an absence of walls within the stacks, full sight lines are created from one end of the atrium to the other," added David Ziskind, chief architect at consultancy STV, which also worked on the project.

Larry Allyn Conrad, civic and political leader, was born in Laconia, Indiana in 1935, to Ruby Rooksby Conrad and Marshall Conrad. He graduated from Ball State University and married Mary Lou Hoover in 1957. He received an LL.B from Indiana University- Indianapolis School of Law in 1961. His political career began in 1962, when he successfully managed Birch Bayh's campaign for the United States Senate. Bayh subsequently hired Conrad first as his legislative assistant and later as Chief Counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. Conrad is considered the chief architect of the 25th Amendment. In 1969 Conrad moved back to Indiana, and campaigned successfully for the office of Secretary of State, a position he held from 1970 to 1978. Conrad campaigned twice, unsuccessfully, in Indiana's gubernatorial race. In 1972, he lost the Democratic nomination in the primary to former governor Matt Welsh. In 1976, he won the nomination but lost the race to Republican incumbent Otis "Doc" Bowen. In 1979 Conrad entered private practice with Raymond Hafsten, specializing in governmental affairs. In 1983 he became Vice-President of Corporate Affairs for Melvin Simon and Associates, Indianapolis based shopping center developers. Conrad promoted Indianapolis tirelessly. He planned the opening ceremonies for the National Sports Festival in 1982, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Tenth Pan American Games in 1987. In addition, he was involved in a variety of civic and philanthropic endeavors. Conrad left the Simons in 1989 to form a political consulting firm, The Conrad Group. He died in Lyon, France, the following year.

Conrad's political career began when he managed Birch Bayh's successful campaign for the United States Senate in 1962. Bayh subsequently appointed Conrad his legislative assistant and later the Chief Counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. Conrad is now considered the chief architect of the 25th Amendment on presidential disability and succession.

Its open-source libraries are extremely beneficial for hacking because it is a basic yet powerful scripting language. Python has been used by ethical hackers to generate password cracking, brute force scripts, sniffing, and information-gathering tools.

You must be able to work rapidly to be a good hacker. Python's vast library provides speed. Knowing how to use libraries will make your hacking process a lot easier. Learning Python libraries can benefit everyone, from a chief information security officer to a security architect to a successful hacker.

Ethical hackers speed up the scanning process by using modern operating systems, which Python libraries can also aid with. They are among the best network hacking tools available and can help credential harvesters and other bad actors who hack for financial gain succeed.

Python has a simple syntax and a variety of libraries to help in the hacking process. Libraries for several areas are provided, including the PI touch intensive loop for artificial intelligence, ScaPy for hacking, pandas, and matplotlib for data science.

Many ethical hackers employ cryptography as a library to streamline the process with message digests, symmetric ciphers, and key derivation tools. There are also more libraries available, such as RawSocketPy, which facilitates communication with MAC addresses easier.

While Python is quickly becoming the language of choice for developers, it is also popular among hackers. The language has some essential characteristics that make it very suitable for hacking. Hackers take advantage of the powerful capabilities provided by pre-built libraries.

Furthermore, Python libraries like Pulsar are extremely accessible to any ethical hacker. The Python community is a friendly place for any ethical hacking questions, which also opens doors to job opportunities.

Seventeen years ago, on April 10th 1991, a plane landed in John F. Kennedy airport. That plane had just crossed the Atlantic carrying, amongst others, passengers escaping the crumbling Soviet empire. One of whom was me. I walked off that plane with a first ever taste of Coca-Cola in my mouth, a lame teenage mustache, and not a clue about what to expect.When my sister emailed me on April 10th 2008 and reminded me of our immigration anniversary, I was suddenly overwhelmed with memories. A lot has happened since then. 17 years is such a long time that it is difficult to fathom. I am left with bits and pieces of memories and the person that I am today. Each memory by itself is rarely strong and profound. A single memory is a just a dot in your timeline. But when you pile the memories on top of each other, you get a bigger and better picture. Here is to everyone who made my American Dream come true and all of you who helped me grow as a software engineer.Lehigh University: The BasicsI went to engineering school: Lehigh University in Bethlehem PA. My credits from Ukraine got me into the sophomore year and I immediately declared a math major. I was always a good student, but I never loved math (can you blame me?). It was always too abstract and too detached from reality. I knew how to manipulate formulas, but I had no idea why I was doing it.My mom was concerned about my future. She kept telling me that there is no money in Math and that I should learn computers - the thing of the future. Back then I was scared of computers. My only prior encounter with them was back in Ukraine where a computer was a humongous piece of metal. The only program that I'd written in Basic to multiply matrices had an infinite loop in it and an angry professor had to reboot the whole machine to stop it. I got a C in that class.So when I realized that the path to my happiness was in computers, I was kind of scared. To top it off, the first programming class that I took was Introduction to Computer Engineering, focused on coding in Assembly language. The final project was to write an editor in Assembly 8086; and for over three weeks I was trying all possible combinations of letters and digits that could make the program run. I got it, but it was really like monkeys typing Shakespeare.Strangely enough, that did not stop me and I then took Data Structures in Pascal. My professor, Dr. Adair Dingle, was probably the reason I stuck with programming. For the first time I was fascinated with computer science, got 100 on a test and coded something that actually ran. She was great and made me believe that I can do it. So I declared a minor in Computer Science.In my senior year I took a Systems Programming class from a guy named Stephen Corbissero. He was not a professor, but he was the best teacher in the CS department because he actually knew how things worked. He could code in C and he knew Unix inside out. I was scared of him and of all electrical engineers that loved him. But I really wanted to learn C, so I took the class. As a final project we had to write a Unix Shell. It was hard for me, really really hard. I spent weeks in the lab working on this class. In the end I got an A- and learned that I can plunge through hard problems if I keep at them. And thanks to this class, I also got the skills needed to get my first job.Goldman Sachs: Motif, C and PassionIn April of 1994 I had 3 offers. The first one was from Goldman Sachs in New York to work on Wall Street. My second offer was from IBM in Virginia to work on an aeronautics project and the last offer was to join the programming staff of the pharmaceutical giant Merck. I did not want to get clearance nor was I excited enough about Merck, so I packed my bag and went to where the action is at - New York City.Goldman has always been an amazing company and back in 1994 it was still privately held. It was famous for hiring smart, capable college kids and then making them work really hard, while paying good salaries and fantastic end of year bonuses. During one of the interviews, I was asked to explain how Hashtables worked. To this day this is my favorite introductory technical question.But Goldman had no illusions about our skills. College graduates where expected to have only theoretical knowledge, and so for the 2 months during the summer we were put through a training program called NAPA (new associate programmer analyst). The main objective was to make sure that we get out knowing how to program in C.Since most of us had no idea what was the difference between char* and char** (the latter one was just scary), there was a lot of work to be done. Not only did we have to learn C well, we also needed to learn the X Window environment - a de facto standard on Wall Street in the early nineties. X Window came out of MIT and was a set of amazing client-server libraries for building graphical applications. We learned the raw X Window library, the layer above Xt and the widget layer called Motif. I really did not understand how everything worked, but I got a sense of how powerful abstractions, libraries and layers can be.My first project was to work on an account reconciliation system. Lots of systems in any financial institution are focused on reconciliation. Since any discrepancy can cost the company millions of dollars, the correctness of all books is of paramount importance. Back then the system ran a nightly batch that transferred data into a relational database. The interface was written in Motif and allowed managers to flip through thousands of bits of information. It had a striking resemblance to Excel - a table with columns that could be sorted and searched. But it needed to be custom, because Wall Street was all about custom IT.I spent 2 years working on Financial systems in Goldman, mastering C and X libraries, picking up Tcl/Tk, learning SQL and Sybase and a development environment called TeleUSE with its C-based scripting language D. In the process, I learned regular expressions, Awk and a bit of Perl, although I never developed a taste for any them. But I got infected and I became very curious about programming. I wanted to do it well, very well. And so once again, like back in college, I spent my time plunging through problems. I would work 16+ hour days, going home only to shower and get some quick sleep. I would swallow programming books one after another and spend endless hours talking to people about code.Back in Goldman I made a few good friends who stayed with me in my journey through the world of programming. One of them in particular made a big impact on me. No matter what, he would always figure stuff out. He was sharp, but more than that, he applied common sense. This was the tool that I lacked and he completely mastered. Looking back now, I realize that he was the first master of patterns that I ever met. And even though consciously I did not express it, the bug of patterns was planted inside of me. From then on I would be on an intense search for patterns in programming, science and life.D.E.Shaw & Co: C++ and sharksAfter spending 2 years at Goldman I was feeling bored. Not that I had mastered programming - far from it. I just felt that there was something better out there. Another friend of mine left the Fixed Income group to join a company called Juno, a spin off from a high tech investment fund called D.E.Shaw & Co.David E. Shaw is a famous computer scientist in Columbia University. In 19