You Need a Hacking Night

by Ammar

The Internet is full of amazing communities, forums, video tutorials, and subreddits.  The problem is not how little information is there, but rather how much.

My open tabs are in the hundreds, some duplicates for sure but so many of them are Stack Overflow answers, tutorials, documentation, GitHub issues, and such.

I look at these and quickly lose the appetite to work on something.  I end up looking for a new exciting thing or work on the thing that is really bothering me at the moment, like getting my Raspberry Pi to connect to my Wi-Fi.

What Are Hacking Nights?

I invite a group of friends to hang out once a week where we work on shared or unrelated projects.

I print out a sign-up sheet where everyone states their goals for that night and later review if the night went according to plan or took a different turn.  Wi-Fi and maybe some tea and snacks, and voilà, magic happens!

Motivation

I don't get tons of work done at a hacking night; I end up chatting a lot!

But getting to have this nerdy conversation motivates me to do more stuff on my own.  I always want to text my friend two days later saying "I figured it out.  I just needed to do X and Y."

Help

When I run into a problem hacking by myself, I start feeling pain in my head.

The pain intensifies the longer I have no clue what's going on.

At hacking nights, I just scream "Why is this so stupid?", and someone leans over while I tilt the screen towards them, signaling consent for them to peek at my screen and say "Oh, I know this error.  You might need to disable your VPN."

Discussions

You bet I don't say "You're right" and move on.  I ask "Why?"

Whether the friend knows why or we just start reading about it together, there is a decent chance we have a wonderful discussion and we learn a thing or two out of it.

Community

Let's face it... we are all lonely, and we go to house parties or social gatherings because our therapist said we need to meet people, but we are day-dreaming about all the shell scripts we want to write after we get home that will make your productivity 1000 times better and save the world.

Hacking nights is getting to work on that script while socializing.  I bet your therapist didn't think of that, but if they say anything less than "this is brilliant," you pretty much need to change therapist(s).

Security

We all have some messy stuff left around on our devices and networks.

SSH port open to public because you didn't think of tunneling into your home network to access your home server, router admin password left as default, a vulnerable upstream DNS server, the list goes on.

Hacking nights is a place to point those out to each other and to come up with solutions that you can share with your less tech savvy friends, family, and community.

In conclusion, you owe it to yourself and the world to have a night every week or so where you tinker socially.