Reverse Engineering: A show-off word for what you are actually doing

This is a review of my previous experiences working with reverse engineering, and why it became something scary and complex at first to something fun.

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First of all, let’s clarify what reverse engineering means :

The act of copying the prodcut of another company by looking carefully how it is made.

And how did I start to work with reverse engineering? Well, I was unhappy in my last job and was looking for roles in workatstartup.com and found a post looking for a Junior Software Engineer for Reverse Engineer. At first, the name got me scared, but well, they had the qualificatory challenge there in PDF, and whoever could submit it and explain the thought process could apply for the role. And I did.

The idea was to create an application that would enter a web platform, kind of like a bank. Login into it using credentials that you would have to register beforehand, and extract data from that platform to create an Excel file. But how do I do this?

The answer to what reverse engineering was became kind of obvious. I would check every HTTP request that the platform was doing while I was performing those actions and try to mimic them into my “script“.

The beauty of the process

The process was really like a detective investigation trying to collect clues. Which request to send? Which queries to perform? Which cookies to keep on my HTTP session?

It was different from everything that I was used to because instead of just building API and accommodating business logic into my code.

I was looking at a final product that didn’t want me there - it was for banking platforms, but relax, cause everything was legal - and that was in constant change.

Conclusion

Just because it sound complex doesn’t mean it actually is.

This was my first international job. I was kind of taken aback thinking it would be something really hard and out of my skill set. It ended up being an opportunity to learn that we can’t be stuck with some idea regarding of capacity to build something without even trying.

Something that sounded like a super boring job became a really fun challenge that I could tackle all by myself, and that would entertain me for hours like a puzzle game in Zelda.