It's been quiet here for more than a year. That's OK, I've been busy with my real life and other projects.
Well, that's a lame excuse! 🙂 In this post I'll try to explain what happened and how I (hopefully) solved the issue.
Forums have disappeared.
When I started with reverse engineering, there were plenty of forums dedicated to reversing. You could go to any one of them, discuss interesting stuff, post your findings and have a (reasonably) productive discussion about the topic. These days, it's all Discord and Telegram channels and tweets on X. Everyone is screaming "Look how awesome I am!" and nobody is listening. The remaining few forums are overrun with illiterate noobs that can barely read and demand a video tutorial for any question they might have.
AI has changed the entry barrier.
The advent of AI isn't helping it either. People who couldn't reverse engineer anything on their own, suddenly have a magic tooling which allows them to reverse engineer a complete PC game from 90s. Or a completely custom protocol of an IoT device. Or something. And they are all screaming into the universe about their "achievements".
Meh.
Reverse Engineering has changed.
There are many more people doing some sort of reverse engineering. There are so many different platforms, so many hardware gadgets analyze, so many programs to take apart! It's great but.. When I see all those awesome projects, it makes me feel small and insignificant. Why would anyone care about my very niche project and analysis of something really obscure?
So, how do I keep doing what I like and stop feeling so inadequate? Let's do some research!
Ambient overload.
While searching for answers, I found an article by Nicholas Carr where he described an issue he calls "ambient overload".
We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.
Well, that sounds familiar. 🙂 So, what is the solution?
Another columnist Oliver Burkeman in his article suggests:
You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities — and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.
So, in order to feel better, I need to accept that I won't be able to do all the reverse engineering in the world. I won't even be able to read about all the cool projects. And that is perfectly fine.
I can do that!
Glad to see an update about ur life, yes I agree that we can't always see or be part of all the projects that's been going on but at the very least we can all enjoy what we can follow and pay attention to the fullest. The same can be applied with me dabbling into a freeware fighting game engine, everyone has awesome projects and I cant seem to keep up with everything but I just go at my own pace while I do my own project. Hope u r doing well
Thank you for the kind words! 🙂 I hope to keep my motivation up and post at least semi-regularly. Let's see how that goes.
I miss active forums too. Sadly the world with its short attention span has moved on. What's worse is that it's getting hard to find back these discussions. Forums had the benefit that things were automatically categorized, indexed and archived in threads, discoverable by search engines/crawlers. Good luck finding that one random message back in a Discord with 100s of messages every day.
> "When I see all those awesome projects, it makes me feel small and insignificant. Why would anyone care about my very niche project and analysis of something really obscure?"
This is one of the reasons why I always try to just stick to doing my own thing. Going deep on a single topic while having fun with what you're doing, even if the project is super niche, is much more rewarding than trying to do everything at once. Comparison is the devil.
Glad to see you're around :).
Ditching social and checking github profiles and blogs of certain people helped keeping me sane. Glad to see yours active again