Today a couple of folks in the Anukari discord server were asking why, on this devlog, my author description includes "Trampoline Enthusiast." This got me thinking about some fun stories and I figured I'd share them here.

Meebo

In 2011, I had been working on the same energy monitoring software for about 7 years. It had started as a tiny 5 person company doing HVAC and lighting power optimization for Costco, but we went through a couple of acquisitions by bigger companies, and ultimately we landed at SunEdison. I was responsible for the embedded software on a little computer (basically a SoC with a bunch of I/O ports) that could communicate over a dozen protocols to various esoteric power equipment. These little computers lived at 500+ small solar power plants, and did basic monitoring and logging. Each site had either a cell or satellite modem, and sent telemetry back to a central server. Basically the value was that we could diagnose problems remotely, and choose to roll out a maintenance operator when needed. (Maybe one day I'll do a longer post about this era, I have some hilarious stories there too.)

Anyway, despite a lot of changes, after 7 years of working on the same codebase I was ready for something new. I think I heard that Meebo was hiring from a Hacker News post. And quickly on their website, I found that if you viewed the source code, there was an interview questionnaire embedded in a comment. I thought that was fun, so I answered all the questions and sent the answers to the email address listed in the comment.

That got me a day of on-site interviews. The way Meebo did this was really fun. Basically the first half of the interview day, they set you up at a workstation in the middle of the bullpen with the entire team. And they gave you a coding project. Open book, feel free to Google anything: write a working web server in C. For lunch, the whole team takes you out to a favorite restaurant, and then in the afternoon you do standard whiteboard interviews. Finally at the end of the day, the team gets together in person to do a live code review of the C code you wrote in the morning.

Everyone was super friendly, and I was pretty relaxed all day. But when we were in the conference room with my C code projected on the wall, waiting for the entire team to pile into the room to review it... I was starting to sweat. Maybe even freaking out a little. But then Allen Kerr arrived in the room completely barefoot, and with a huge grin on his face.

Somehow Allen's lack of shoes, or even socks, set me completely at ease. Suddenly I remembered how chill everyone was. I relaxed, the review went great, and I got the job. I'm not sure if I ever thanked Allen.

Trampoline Enthusiasm

So the origin of the "Trampoline Enthusiast" thing is that it was, unbeknownst to anyone but me, my official job title at Meebo. How could even my boss not know my official job title?

On my first day working at Meebo, there was some kind of outage in whatever software we used for HR stuff. Normally a new employee would log in to some IT portal thing, create their account, and get set up. But due to the outage, the self-serve portal was down.

The guy responsible for IT stuff came by my desk and told me that due to the outage, the easiest way to get me started was to type my password into his laptop, directly into the HR admin interface. He held out his laptop to me and looked away so he wouldn't see my password.

While typing my password, I noticed that the next input field was "Job Title." I quickly hit tab, and because he's standing there holding his laptop for me, I had to type literally the first thing that came to my mind. There was no time to ponder.

And so I typed out, "Trampoline Enthusiast."

I honestly have no idea why these words came to my mind. I mean, I do like trampolines. But I hadn't jumped on one in 10 years. To my knowledge, there was nothing in my life that would suggest that this word held any particular importance. I guess that it felt like a good "random" word.

My subterfuge went unnoticed. The IT guy didn't notice, and my new job title slipped into the system.

There was no reason for anybody to look at my job title for several months. It only came to light when the team was planning to go to PyCon, and thus we needed personal business cards to hand out. Someone was proofing the business cards and noticed my ridiculous job title. There was great confusion as to how it happened. I spilled the beans about how I edited my job title on my first day. Everyone thought it was hilarious, and thus it became my official title, printed on my business cards and everything. My wife had a nice desk nameplate printed out for me with the title.

So now I'm a Trampoline Enthusiast for life, even though I don't even own a trampoline. (To all true trampoline enthusiasts out there, I am sorry for being a poser.)

The Finger Rocket Wars

Since I'm on the topic of Meebo stories, one thing that I have to mention is the Finger Rocket Wars at Meebo.

Evidently finger rockets (those little foam darts with a rubber band you can use to launch them) were a tradition at Meebo long before my arrival. There were hundreds of them around the office. Little piles on desks everywhere, and also a couple of huge boxes just full of them.

I had heard stories of Wars that would sometimes break out. Mostly I witnessed only small skirmishes. It was completely normal that a finger rocket would whizz over the cubicles occasionally. But a ceasefire would quickly ensue.

Fortunately I did get to take part in one full War. It was about two hours of absolute chaos in the office. We're talking people laying desks on their side to use as cover. People crawling around army-style to flank their enemies. Somehow teams formed spontaneously, and there were betrayals. Treason. Territorial land grabs. Ammunition thefts. It was, in other words, a good fun time.  :)

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The team learns my dark educational secret

I have never made a secret of the fact that I have no college degree. For one: who cares. But also, because some people do care, it's much easier for them to know up front.

But also it's not like my resume had a "No college degree" bullet point. There's just no education section on it at all. Because again, who cares.

One day at Meebo, a few months into my career there, the team was out for pizza and beer. My boss and a bunch of the most senior engineers were there. And at some point the topic of discussion turned to colleges, and my boss turned to me and said, "oh, Evan, it occurs to me that I can't even remember where you got your degree?"

I replied that I do not have a degree, and there was a brief silence at the table. I think people were trying to decide if I was joking or serious. When they realized I was serious, everyone burst out laughing. It turned out that nobody had ever asked or checked whether I had a college degree, and just assumed I did. I had always assumed that they knew I was a flunkie. It was quite a hilarious moment for us all to realize that we were wrong.

The fact that it was a moment of comedy speaks to what a great group of people I worked with at Meebo.

The Golden Goose

I'm having too much fun remembering old Meebo stories... I'll share just one last story.

The product that people remember Meebo for was the multi-protocol chat client that lived in a browser window. In the 2000s, there were a plethora of chat protocols: Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, and probably more. But often you'd have friends in multiple services, and you'd end up installing and logging into several of them, which was a big hassle.

Meebo's chat client let you log in to the services once in a web interface, and then you could log into Meebo from anywhere, and have access to all your chats, with the windows and chat history still open right where you left them. This sounds obvious now, but back then it was innovative.

At that time, there was an open-source desktop app called Pidgin that did the multi-protocol part. Pidgin internally was implemented via a library called libpurple. And one of the most prolific contributors to Pidgin/libpurple, Mark Doliner, worked at Meebo.

Note that early on in instant messaging, for example with ICQ, if the recipient was offline, the sender's client couldn't deliver the message, so it sat queued locally on the sender's machine until both parties were online simultaneously. There was no server-side store-and-forward.

So one big convenience that Meebo provided is that we ran a personal persistent instance of libpurple on our servers for each user. This is kind of insane: it means that every user had their very own live process, with all the system resources that entails!

Each libpurple process lived on a specific machine, with a specific port associated with it. When a user logged in, for efficiency, this machine's IP and port were stored in a browser cookie. This made subsequent requests trivially easy to route to that user's libpurple process. For tamper-prevention, the cookie was concatenated with a secret and hashed, and the hash was also stored in the cookie. So the server would verify the hash before trusting the IP:port in the cookie.

The problem was: the secret was very short. I don't remember it verbatim, but it was some form of "g0ld3ng00se". Which is hilarious: our golden goose was literally "golden goose" but with some numbers mixed in.

I complained that the secret was too short, that maybe it could be brute-forced, which would allow an attacker to forge the IP:port combination, which was probably bad. Nobody took my complaints too seriously. It was an obscure thing, and even if it was broken, it was a little unclear what an attacker would gain. But still, it bothered me.

In late 2011, Meebo had an internal hackathon. For a week, the engineering team dropped all regular work, and everybody worked on whatever cool thing they wanted. So what did I do? Of course I wrote a GPU-based brute-force SHA1 secret cracker, which I named Eggbeater. The code for it is up on github here. I proved that the secret could be broken for about $140 of compute time, and won the hackathon.

But what did I win? Well... I won myself the job of going through all our systems and migrating them to use a stronger secret. Which was a pain in the butt.  :)

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