[clug] July tech talks

[Michael Still]

George,

I think we need to accept the reality that volunteers giving a small ad hoc
talk at a users group are probably not going to spend hours producing
courseware or slide decks -- remember, the original concept for this
month's meeting was a series of quick talks about small tools people had
lying around. If that makes my offer of a five minute (ish) talk
unacceptable I am happy enough to withdraw it.

That said, the general flow I was thinking about was something along the
lines of:

 - what is a REST API at a very high level
 - why would you want to reverse engineer a web app which talks to a REST
API
 - how to observe the network traffic of a simple web application (the
Aussie Broadband customer portal in this case) in your browser even if the
app is using SSL
 - a simple re-implementation of some parts of that client in python

I'm not intending to introduce python, or spend more than a couple of
minutes on HTTP or REST.

One of the fundamental issues with a talk like this is that a simple five
minute talk would become unworkably onerous if I was to explain all of the
fundamental grounding. Just quickly off the top of my head that would
include:

 - HTTP
 - programming concepts such as APIs
 - REST semantics in detail
 - javascript and JSON (which I guess implies covering object serialisation
at some level too)
 - how the javascript engine works in Chrome
 - SSL and why it gets in the way
 - python language fundamentals
 - etc etc

So I guess we have two options. I bravely give up on the talk, or some
people accept that its just going to be a fun little talk about a quick
hack and that some aspects might be over their head.

Its important to remember that speakers are volunteers too. If the
experience isn't fun for the speaker (huge amounts of prep, constant
interruptions, insulting social media posts afterwards), then speakers are
simply not going to be inclined to volunteer in the future. Frankly, this
is why I went from being a frequent attendee before 2013 to stopping
coming, CLUG simply stopped being a good use of my time.

That said, the following inexpensive online courses would help someone
learn the relevant background if there is genuine interest:

 - https://www.udemy.com/complete-python-bootcamp/
 - https://www.udemy.com/course/rest-api-flask-and-python/
 - https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-javascript-course/

Michael


On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 4:55 PM George at Clug via linux <
linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wednesday, 17-07-2019 at 16:06 Michael Still via linux wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 1:05 PM Bryan Kilgallin via linux <
> > linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Steve wrote:
> > >
> > > > Just a reminder that this month's talks will be a series of short
> > > > technical talks.
> > >
> > > Please would speakers post in advance, the URL of an intro page on
> their
> > > topic.
> > >
> >
> > For mine, if you don't understand the content of
> > https://pypi.org/project/aussiebb/ you will get little to nothing from
> the
> > talk.
>
> Michael,
>
> Thanks for the link. Please note: I have not as yet downloaded your sample
> code.
>
> I have been a Microsoft Visual Basic programmer, and a C programmer in the
> past. I am very interested in Python. Attended a few Python courses. I will
> endeavor to get up to speed for you talk.
>
> I have come to understand that Python is a language that 1) uses garbage
> collection for memory management and 2) is so object oriented that every
> think is an object, including an integer, something that would require me
> to rethink my way of programming, coming from a C and C++ background.  It
> is a pity that most programmers seem to find managing memory management
> themselves difficult, and that this has caused languages have to manage it
> for them, but I expect it leads to more stable programs, I would never feel
> safe if people used C for managing nuclear reactors.
>
> Though I guess to understand your actual topic of "Reverse Engineering the
> Aussie Broadband portal" I would require knowledge of network protocols?
> And that Python is simply the language (i.e. tool) that you are using to
> communicate with the "Aussie Broadband portal" ?
>
> George.
>
> >
> > Michael
> > --
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> > linux at lists.samba.org
> > https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/linux
> >
>
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