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After 5 Years of Fun Fun Function, Coding Legend MPJ Moves On to His Next Big Journey

Quincy Larson — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 05:39:46 GMT

5 years ago, Mattias Petter Johansson – better known as MPJ – was already a well-known developer.

He had made a name for himself by answering hundreds of coding questions on Quora. And he had gone from theater student to prolific developer, having built a product that was acquired by Blackberry.

So in the summer of 2015, MPJ was working at the height of his field as a front-end developer at Spotify in his native Sweden. And that's when he decided – seemingly out of nowhere – to launch a programming YouTube channel.

I distinctly remember sitting in my parent's living room with some hot tea when his first video went live. And of course I clicked on it. Because how can you not click on a video called Fun Fun Function?

"Hello!" MPJ shouted exuberantly in his first video. "In this video series, I will teach you how to do functional programming in JavaScript."

Little did any of us know at the time that this "video series" would stretch on for 5 years, span more than 200 episodes, and ultimately become MPJ's full-time focus.

Gifting The Developer Community a Trove of Coding Fun

In addition to functional programming, MPJ covered lots of other programming topics.

A video on Lua, a popular language for game development that is frequently taught in high schools.

Throughout the show, there were two reliable fixtures: MPJ's high energy, and his ever-changing hair color.

Redux creator and React maintainer Dan Abramov came on Fun Fun Function to discuss React Hooks with MPJ.

Over the years, MPJ did cross-overs with some of the most exciting teachers in tech.

An episode where MPJ teamed up with coding live-streamer and mechanical keyboard aficionado Noopkat to do some LED strip hardware hacking with JavaScript.

He also shared lots of insights around how to break into the field of software development, and how to continue to progress with your career.

MPJ talks with career coaches Ingrid Kocjan and Megan Vallee about career advancement as a developer.

All Good Things Must Come to an End

So today, it was with mixed emotions that I watched his final video.

If you have 15 minutes, I encourage you to watch the video – even if you've never watched his channel before. Because this is a master class in how you responsibly and decisively bow out of a long-running project.

I probably learned more about MPJ and what kind of person he is from this video than I did from all his other zany, thoughtful videos combined.

No matter how good you are, you can still get better MPJ is a passionate developer who loves coding and loves teaching. All of this shines through in his videos. But he is also someone who sees his life's work as largely unfinished.

He has the humility to realize the limits of his own abilities, and to continue exploring and expanding past them.

As he explains in his final video:

When I started Fun Fun Function I was still at Spotify, and it was a little bit of an outlet for me to talk about musings while I was at Spotify building.And when I went full time [on Fun Fun Function], all I was doing was talking about creating – not actually creating.

When I did create, it was tools that facilitated creation – Twitch overlays and stuff like that.Don't get me wrong, this was an amazing way to spend my time. I heard from thousands of people how I've helped them become better and more inspired developers by sharing my passion and knowledge with the world. But I think that now, 5 years later, I'm out of things to share.I've shared all of the stuff that I learned during my time working as a programmer.

And I've also lost a little bit of the passion for the craft itself, like coding. And so I can't really contribute with much enthusiasm either at this point. So now it's time for me to go back to the place where you all are.

A Higher Calling

Most importantly, MPJ wants to play a part in addressing an important challenge facing humanity – the challenge of mental health.

He explains:

I want to go back to building products, putting things out into the world, and spend some time thinking about what it is that I care about. What is it that I should be creating?I care about a lot of things. But one thing that sticks out lately is psychology and mental health. I don't talk much about this on the channel, but when I was in my late teens, my mother committed suicide. It was after a very long battle with chronic depression and addiction to benzodiazepines.

During the last year or so I've been going to therapy myself, facing a lot of inner demons that have been there for many many years. And as I've done this I've realized what a big, interesting, important problem mental health is. I've grown the opinion that mental health is an area that way more people should be working on. Globally more than 800,000 people commit suicide every year. In almost all countries, suicide is a more common way to die than homicide – sometimes 10 or 20 times more. Every 40 seconds someone commits suicide.

We may not get any more Fun Fun Function videos, but it is heartening to know that people like MPJ are out there working hard on the big problems facing humanity.

And I will always be grateful for the many insights MPJ has left us with.

You can browse the full archive of his Fun Fun Function videos here.

And Mattias – if you're reading this – Godspeed on your future endeavors. Programmer YouTube won't be the same without you.

All I Really Need to Know About InfoSec, I learned from Mr. Robot

Quincy Larson — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 20:05:03 GMT

I was trapped on a beastly 14-hour flight to China — complete with a jet-lagged newborn on my lap. Fortunately, the in-flight entertainment included a new cybercrime drama called Mr. Robot.

This show takes technical realism to levels unprecedented for Hollywood. It succeeded in distracting me from the awkwardness of being “that guy” with the crying baby. And I even learned a few things about information security.

Out of respect for readers who haven’t yet watched this Golden Globe-winning series, I’ve purged this article of any reference to characters or plots in the story. Read on with confidence — this is a spoiler-free article.

Without further ado, here are five information security lessons from season 1 of Mr. Robot.

1. A hacker can compromise your phone in seconds, and you’ll never even know it

Hackers don’t need to steal your phone — that would be too obvious, and would only give them access to your data from the past.

Instead, they can gain control of your phone using spyware. They can do this in minutes, and you’ll never even know.

In Mr. Robot, one of the characters installs a root kit on someone’s phone in less time than it takes to shower. Using Flexispy — a widely-used Android spyware tool — the character “roots” the phone — putting it in superuser mode — and then hides the normal superuser icon to obscure the fact that the phone has been tampered with.

From now on, the character is able to monitor all of that phone’s digital and audio communications.

Word to the wise — using your phone’s thumbprint scanner or setting a lock screen password will make it much harder for a hacker to do this to you.

2. Don’t accept CDs or USB drives from strangers

Emerging from the subway, a boombox-blasting rapper offers you a free copy of his newest album.

Now, you wouldn’t take candy from some guy in bellbottom jeans and stick it in your mouth. Don’t take a CD from some guy in a flat-bill cap and stick it in your computer!

To be fair, you would still need to execute a file. In Mr. Robot, hackers use an alluring filename like “Free iTunes Gift Card.exe” to dupe the victim into double-clicking it. This installs a Remote Access Trojan (RAT), effectively giving the attacker access to files and even webcams. Creepy.

Hide things in plain sight Sometimes the best place to hide things is right out in the open. Who would think twice about that binder of old rock albums on your floor?

What looks like a normal CD — that even plays their album scrawled on it with a sharpie—actually contains an extra layer of data stashed within.

Removed from any network access, the only way to read the data on these CDs would be to physically enter the premise and get a hold of them. You’d then for at least long enough to spin up an optical drive and dump their contents.

If you aren’t using Bluetooth, turn it off.

If an attacker discovers an open bluetooth connection on your device, they could connect their own keyboard to it and start inputing commands.

Yes, it is possible to open up a terminal with a series of hotkeys in both Windows and OSX, and from there type in malicious commands.

As a bonus, turning off bluetooth when you’re out and about will reduce your battery consumption, giving you more time to read Medium articles like this one (and follow Medium writers like me).

You are your own greatest vulnerability

Throughout Mr. Robot, the most common exploit is good old social engineering — manipulating people into doing what you want.

Here are some red flags to look out for when interacting with strangers:

a phone call that jumps straight into “I just need to ask you some security questions first” — many services use the same security questions, and these could also be used to speed up a brute-force attempt to guess your password.
A stranger approaches you with an all-too-plausible story and asks to use your phone — this is an easy way to get your phone number or other identifying information
Your own vanity, laziness, love of family, or fear of germs — these are all vulnerabilities that an attacker can take advantage of. If a stranger seems to be winding you up emotionally for no reason, they may be more than just a mean person. They may be an attacker.