I have a role for a swedish intermediate/senior Elixir developer.

The role is based in Sweden (no exceptions, compliance reasons). Stockholm is preferred, flexible on-site is preferred but they can be open for remote for the right candidate.

The company is a small security product company making large moves. They are taking their cloud platform from Ruby and Go to Elixir. And they are developing hardware projects with Nerves. Significant experience with Elixir is required. Ideally involving Phoenix and Ecto, kind of standard. Experience in Nerves is a big plus, experience in Ruby and Go for the purposes of the migration are beneficial but not necessary.

I have worked with the company in a consulting capacity and now help them recruit for this role. I really like working with them. They have a scrappy approach and a lively culture in a field that is often suffocatingly boring. They are happy to support the community and ecosystem.

Again, Sweden only for now.

"Tänka som en hackare"

I have met two boomer-era men in tech now that clearly, at some point, were told conspiratorially, controversially that there is a particular way a software engineer must think. "Think like a hacker" one told me as we were setting up a checklist for PRs. This was the crux of writing secure software. This was important and the checkbox would ensure that someone had thought in that manner. The other one gave me the hard former army officer stare as he was about to unveil the controversial wisdom someone had imparted onto him. It must have blown his mind because he dropped it on me like a ton of bricks. "The engineer must think like a hacker."

Both are fine people. But also quite neat and squared off. Neither could grok what it means or how ancient it made them sound, to me. And I'm increasingly ancient. I suspect they might be right to press on this. They'll fail to inspire the thinking they suggest but they are right to want it.

Among reasonable software development organisations the idea that you have to have an adversarial mindset towards you code and your systems is not controversial. I think many fail for various reasons. Complacency, culture, budget, deadlines, low industry standards and no consequences in the business for utter failure at security. Maybe the CRA in the EU will actullay shift the pressure in that regard. We'll see.

I spent a fair bit of my teenage years engaged in a hacking community (wargames.unix.se, later Digital Evolution, dievo.org, sound off if you know it, the games live on). I had a hard time getting into the C stuff and never really spent my effort on web exploits because either I suck or I prefer building things. I know the culture, I know the mindset, I have a very decent fundamental understanding of security if not the consistent practice in breaking it.

The ideals fed to us who got into computers between the 80s and the millenium shift typically came from the old-school hackers. Free Mitnick, the Jargon file, Phrack and various legendary textfiles. The manifesto. Free software which has now almost been fully eclipsed by Open Source. For me Linux was a way to afford running a web server and a database. This was not a perfectly balanced diet or perfect ideals to pick up. It was an often nasty, sarcastic cess-pit of teenage boys and young men with terrible work-life balance. If there were other groups in the spaces I visited they didn't share that information.

I hope there are other ideals the current generation can pick up than the glory of the startup and the supposed genius billionaires that run things. The startup mindset is a hacker mindset in terms of searching the system of the world for exploits to run. Hack for growth, hack around legislation, find ways to exploit people. A hack mindset, focused on profit. It is not the hacker mindset I believe in which is fundamentally about curiosity. About exploration.  Finding the possible. Finding the edges and corners where a system fails at its purpose.

It seems likely that businesses will gravitate towards letting LLMs write production code. They are not highly qualified at curiousity or creativity. Their ability to "think like a hacker" seems likely to be limited. They perform best at the thick part of the bell curve and creative hacking operates at the tail ends. Using these tools uncritically will produce dumb-ass results just as writing code uncritically will lead to all sorts of interesting failure modes to be exploited. I hope new people coming into software development don't get mired too deply into whatever all this forms as a culture. I expect massive enshittification if any of the LLM promise for software development is realized.

This stuff makes me think a lot about how I can foster the curiosity in other people. I hope I can. Counter-culture, creativity and curiosity. I think that's where you find the best in humanity.

What is the best cultural movement you see, in tech or otherwise? Need to tell me I'm right or wrong? You can get to me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.

The Elixir shirt is now shipping on-demand, you can just buy it at oswag.org. Our little shirt operation. Blessed by core teams everywhere.