And then, because you were never in a classroom and never took a class on security, you probably have no idea what a buffer overflow attack is or how to use tools like valgrind to check for them.

Then you put your C code on the internet and get your server pwned inside of an hour.

Slightly hyperbolic? Yes definitely. But there is a reason we don’t teach C to beginners anymore. Generally you want them to understand the mindset of coding before throwing them in the deep end. And I would bet nothing has caused more people to quit programming then Segmentation fault: core dumped

Pick a popular online service with a public API and write some scripts that integrate with them. Learn by doing.

In my (non-expert) opinion, there are a few reasons

1. NPM is more popular than those other services by an order of magnitude, especially among new developer and startups.
2. NPM allows for code to be executed while you install the package which is different from maven or nuget and allows for easy exploitation paths

This works until you scale the team beyond 1 person and someone else needs to decipher the 30 line awk | sed | xargs monstrosity you created. Give me a real programming language any day.

So long as you have robust data sanitization on the backend to prevent XSS and HTML injection attacks…

If you can get away with just using Markdown, you should definitely use that instead of full HTML.

Racoon is the chaotic energy choice

It’s perfectly normal for your computer to have daemons.

You should definitely set up a DMARC record to prevent other people from using your email domain to send spam. If you don’t have DMARC configured, other email servers will give any senders the benefit of the doubt and accept mail that claims to be from your domain.

You can just set the DMARC record to reject 100% of unverified mail and call it a day. Since you aren’t sending anything it won’t affect you.

These ads only appear in the “promotions” section of Gmail, the section that is by definition for advertising emails. It’s not great, but this is the least intrusive place to put ads.

“I learned participant observation from watching you” is such a phenomenal line