Learn to code!

Welp, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and finally go and spend a significant amount of my time learning to code. Certainly I’m not in unknown territory, heck, I even took up Haskell a couple of times. But I’m fundamentally a system administrator, not a programmer, which for all intents and purposes isn’t the same – I’m very used to setting up and maintaining systems, networking, modifying portions of code when I need software to do something specific differently. And I am still very much in my comfort zone when I write shell scripts, my favorite is zsh (who cares about POSIX-compatibility these days anyway?). But actually learning how to code? With the exception of Haskell which I sadly decided to abort for a host of reasons, I haven’t ever really given that a try. Until now.

There are two things I really enjoy to do in my free time online: waste time on Twitter (yes, a guilty pleasure) and watch YouTube videos. And when on YouTube I’m one of those people who dives into a channel, absorbs its content until there is a certain amount of saturation and I can move on to the next thing. Take for example the videos by scammer hunter Kitboga ↗️. What he does is he counter scams scammers and fraudsters who try to take advantage of the ignorance of mainly old people. The fraudsters send emails like for example “Your subscription to <some service> will be renewed by the amount of $_some_amount, please call $_some_number if you think this is wrong. Kitboga calls up the number, pretends to be an old lady or an old grandpa or something like that, and just keeps the scammers talking. He works together with anti fraud teams (he never really discloses what kind though) so when the scammers give a US bank account, Kitboga is able to report them. Very funny stuff.

Anyway I’ve watched that for a while and then