Category: geek-instructions

It came down to a Capital T…

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

I had an opportunity to take a coding challenge from Dorsia with very strict rules:

  • No AI
  • No googling for info
  • Use your own code editor
  • Share your screen and video

Everything started perfectly. I was able to get the initial tests functional and things sailed very well. Then I had to write an exclusion routine and test cases for that. This is where the wall started to fall in…

I spent over 40 minutes on a problem I couldn’t diagnose, which left the remainder of the challenge with minor doubts. After getting up and walking around things magically fell into place and it came down to the letter “T” that was sabotaging me, as well as my code editor.

Read More

dovecot – out of the box setup

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Trying to learn a new programming language is a daunting task. My process is to take programs that I’ve written before and rewrite them in the target language of choice.

I’ve got a PHP program that interacts with my IMAP server (smart-imap), reads all the messages in the Inbox, takes the localpart of the email address, creates a folder and moves that email into that folder. If the localpart is part of a pre-determined list of email addresses that have been sold off for Spam it’ll move it to the SPAM folder. If there are no localparts that match the domain name of the server then it drops it into an UNSORTED folder.

Today’s language of choice is Python, specifically 3.9.21. To do this entire feat without breaking things I need an IMAP server, and dovecot 2.3.16 is going to be the death of me.

Read More

Interview coding challenge failure…

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Today I went through a standard coding challenge: “Create a minesweeper board with variable rows, columns, and bombs”. The challenge was for 20 minutes, spent 31 minutes, and cannot really figure out why it could never generate.

After my previous posting of “omg my server didn’t have virtual memory” I decided to fiddle it out. With my own fingers this took 12 minutes tops, but the amount of regret I feel is priceless.

Read More

Server Problems, 2025…

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

After Gettin’ hacked and rebuilding with a cheaper server I started encountering random slowness and problems. I always seemed to have random CPU spikes here and there but the console at digitalocean didn’t really give me much to work with.

Today I tried to install git so I can get some repos cloned down to demo and the process kept getting Killed. After some simple googling and basic cross referencing of the system I’m leasing I learned the stupidest thing in the world.

Read More

Gettin’ hacked…

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

This server got hacked. It was used as a scanner for a couple days, attempting to break into other servers to test for vulnerabilities. I only discovered this because I attempted to access this server by the .onion domain that I have for it and it didn’t connect.

I’ve had a home server hacked before due to a user account with a I set up for my son with “an easy” password. I thought I learned that lesson. Apparently I did not with the server I have exposed to the interwebs.

Time to forensically breakdown the timeline of events.

Read More