halpme

I picked up a copy of "Practical Malware Analysis" to get started with malware analysis and reverse engineering. One concern I have, especially after reading the VM setup chapter, is doing malware analysis in a VM on a primary computer. Apparently malware can detect if its running in a virtualized environment, and try to exploit any vulnerabilities to escape it's sandbox to infect the host system.

Now, I have a fancy $2300 MacBook Pro, and I'd be devastated if I messed it up by being careless. I was considering picking up a used Thinkpad for like $150, maybe installing a small SSD and upgrading RAM. Total cost would be more or less $300 and a peace of mind not caring if the laptop gets killed or screwed up.

I want to hear some insight from experienced folks about their thoughts on the topic, if its worth getting a secondary laptop or if I'm being paranoid and can safely run all malware in a VM on my MBP. Thanks!

I graduated from a UC and got a job at Hewlett Packard Enteprise as a software engineer doing security stuff. The first few months were rough, but I was working on cool stuff and my team was awesome. The half-year performance went well and my manager always said I did a good job. I always asked for feedback and ways to improve but no one had issues with my performance.

Well, HPE has been dying for a while and there's rumors of it being bought out. First there was a hiring freeze, then layoffs, and now a company reorganization.

All the teams got scrambled and now I work in a highly undesirable position, doing technical support (more or less). The core engineering team consisted of folks who've been there for 3+ years, while I've been there for 10 months, and the other person who was also moved was there for 4 months (although she had a Ph.D and tons of experience). Seems like the newest members got the short end of the stick.

I've done some on-call technical support and it was terrible: had to be available always in a highly stressful and unrewarding environment, with mostly system troubleshooting, but now this is my full-time gig and I don't get to touch code anymore.

Are there likely to be layoffs soon?

Should I start applying for junior level positions again? Will I have an easier time finding a job this time around because I have some experience at a big company? Can I quit now, or work there long enough until I get a full one year of experience on my resume?

I'm looking to buy an external monitor for my 15" MacBook Pro and use it as the only display. Ideally the monitor would be 23-24" for the screen size and cost no more than $200. It doesn't need to have 4k or ultra HD resolution, but it should be clear and easy on the eyes as I'll be doing a lot of reading and coding. I already have a comfortable mechanical keyboard and mouse, but am unfamiliar with what's commonly used as the monitor.

I recently moved to Mountain View and have been making an effort to meet new people in the area. My primary goal is to find some people who would want to meet up regularly and collaborate on some sort of project just for fun and for the sake of learning new things and socializing with other engineers.

I'm not interested in attending hackathons because I don't have the physical endurance to stay up all night, and most of the meetup groups where people get together to code are inactive. THe majority of current meetups involve only tech talks where people get together to listen to some talk, and then go home.

I graduated college a few months ago and recently started working as an entry-level software developer at a big company in the silicon valley.

I once worked as an intern back-end web application developer, and it wasn't too challenging because most of the frameworks I worked with had an immense amount of online resources to learn from. And the code base wasn't too big so it was easy to pick up on.

But at my new job I'm working with a 20+ year old enterprise code base that relies on internal tools with ambiguous documentation. I don't have a mentor assigned to me, but I do work closely with the lead engineer to ramp up. A good portion of what he says goes over my head, so I either ask for clarifying questions or take notes and do research on my own.

There's a lot I don't know. I made an effort to keep notes of everything my coworkers and lead engineer say, as well as documenting my progress in learning all the technologies. In some ways I'm expanding my knowledge daily, but I don't think it's quickly as I'd like, and sometimes when my coworkers ask if I understand how x or y works and I don't, it seems like I've made no progress on learning at all.

This is my 2nd month here. The first month I spent setting up my dev environment and waiting to be granted permissions to various services. Now that I have a real assignment, I slog through this massive code base and have no idea what I'm doing. I ask for help but have a lot of stupid questions and feel like I'm wasting everybody's time because I can't resolve things on my own. I generally have a good idea of what I don't know and how to learn it, but in a lot of cases I don't know what I don't know and thus don't know what to ask, or how to ask a good question.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself since I've only just started working and it's my 2nd month, but a part of me feels like I should be getting better at figuring things out a lot faster.