Flash. Yup, the one that we all killed a few years ago completely.

I was in school, in my 12s or so, and was fascinated in those cool Flash animations and games on websites in early 2000s. Then a friend of mine showed me a very simple animation that he made, and I asked him how he did it. He showed me Flash MX (I think it was the version back then) and I quickly got the logic of keyframes, layers, and movie clips. I've also learned those things called "scripts" that we could attach to objects and write things like "gotoAndPlay(5)" to control the clip. Then I've realized that there are more, much of those scripts...

Then I got interested in "hacking" in high school and using a custom written IE close that redirects anything to Facebook or Hotmail (FB was just getting super popular and Hotmail was still much more used than Gmail) to my own server at home which I wrote to listen for any requests and log username/password combinations... which gained me access to about a total of ~100 accounts. There was also a day where I brute forced our high school's student information system (where students logged in to see their grades etc) to find out everybody's password, I told this to my friends all everybody was just asking me for their password instead of paperwork with school administration.

Then in college I got into a bit lower lever on the stack: sniffing our (back-then unencrypted/open) school's Wifi in monitor mode, or anonymously joining the network and using Ettercap to do MitM attacks to hijack people's, again, Facebook and a few other social accounts' sessions (HTTP was still the default and many people other than the 1% tech savvy would use Facebook over plaintext HTTP), successfully logging in as a few folks. It's unbelievable that we had a open plaintext Wifi on campus and most of the sites were using HTTP, so all the session data was literally traveling unencrypted in air, just 10 years ago.

Then my motivation shifted to more producive things like web development, and I was already very fluent in C# and got my first few real, paying jobs in ASP.NET development. Then I completely abandoned Microsoft stack and fell in love anything that is Unix-like, went into mobile apps, where I developed some iOS apps (also a few Android ones) natively.

Then there were a few brief moments of getting into cryptocurrency in 2013 (using school computer lab GPUs to mine Litecoin and Feathercoin (which was a thing at that time)), and writing simple market analyzers, trading bots and Telegram pump-n-dump watchers in the ICO hype in 2017.

And here I am now, still developing apps (though now I'm on TypeScript/React Native territory), I also design the UI/UX of the apps that I'm building from the blend of wording to pushing my technical limits into making cool animations/transitions etc... and I still feel the spirit of Flash motivation.

And if you ask whether I feel guilty for what I've done in terms of compromising accounts: Never. I'm so happy that I did them all when I could; I never harmed anyone and it was a great motivation to learn how networking worked in a lower level.

This is my humble story, and if there is only one outcome:

Motivation is everything.