The Late Night Hack That Changed Daniel Hinojosa's Career | Ep. 13

Tim Berglund talks to Daniel Hinojosa (an independent consultant) about his career in software development, data engineering, and event-driven architecture. Daniel’s first job: Sears credit card telemarketing. His challenge: working at a company with internal bad blood and being called at 11 p.m. to pull off a late night “security research” hack on Windows and Lotus Notes systems.

SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites 
Artwork by Phil Vo 

•  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. 
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.
• 👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 
• 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

From counting change to hacking Lotus Notes, this is Confluent Developer.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

It's kind of something they don't know. I'm just dealing their absolute great questions, and I'm like making my stuff better based on those questions. They asked me to figure out what I could find. So a little bit of a hack job, I guess, is what I'll call it. This was kind of exciting, uh, maybe kind of illegal.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hello there, everyone. I'm Tim Berglund. Welcome to Confluent Developer, the podcast where we talk to software developers of all stripes about some of the most interesting problems they've solved. Today I talked to Daniel Hina Hosa, a longtime friend and conference speaker and trainer on diverse topics covering just about everything in Java and data generally. And you know what? When he was in college, maybe he couldn't count change backwards, but he could figure out how to make Lotus Notes do some things that maybe it shouldn't have done. Uh let's listen in. What is it that you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

I am uh an everybody. I don't know if I'm an everybody, uh, but I am a um programmer. I I usually just there are a lot of titles uh flowing around today, so uh I try to keep it humble as much as I can. Uh I know there's a lot of and good for them. I don't want to like you know say anything about everybody else's title. Uh I know there's a lot more AI titles, and I will never do that, uh, although I do dabble in AI, but uh uh never in your title, never in your title. Never in my title. So I'd like to keep it plain and generic and just say uh programmer uh with a butt, and that butt can fly everywhere if you go into uh it's typically the data space. So you know what? I probably add a data engineer, I guess. Uh yeah, yeah, that's fair. So um, you know, uh wrangling data and uh uh dealing with uh Kapka, Spark, and Flink and Iceberg and all that uh other good stuff. So um teacher, trainer, speaker, teacher, trainer, speaker, and I speak at uh NoFluff and uh DevNexus. Usually I'm in DevNexus, but you know, it's their right to give me a break uh every once in a while, so maybe some years you won't see me. So some uh some you would. I really love Dev Nexus a lot. So yeah, I like uh I like that part. Uh I like speaking a lot, and uh I like learning a lot. And I and one of the weird things is like by teaching and uh doing speaking, I learn a lot from the audience, and uh that's kind of it's it's kind of something they don't know that I'm just stealing their absolute great questions, and I'm like making my stuff better based on those questions. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

And they ask questions that you don't know, and that's that's how you like push the boundaries of edge cases you hadn't thought of and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Right. Yeah, that's the discomfort uh or uh learning by discomfort. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Uh now you and I have known each other for a long time, but I don't know um what what was your first job?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

My first job is a plenty. Uh I guess my first job was uh um you know back when I was young, they uh the the church was just looking for someone to fill their office and uh and uh they had a PC there that I would just try to hack into and uh see what I could do. But I don't know if that's really a job. But my first job is a very interesting story, is uh I was at the University of New Mexico. I was uh I think I believe I was doing Calc 3, so I was already doing advanced math. We had a restaurant right across the university called The Frontier. And as part of the interview, uh this isn't my first job, by the way, I'm leading up to it, but as part of the interview, they were um they were saying, hey, uh um this is how you count change backwards. I'm like, count change backwards, what are you talking about? Well, if the order is 1668, then you count backwards to 20, which I think many of you already know, right? So you you just count. But for me, you know, I I'm already like kind of advanced math at university, everything has been top down.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Maybe your arithmetic is okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Yeah, but I'm like my my my mindset is not like geared to like counting backwards, and I was stunned. Anyway, I failed my uh one and only uh job for uh food, uh, and uh a little bit humiliating.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So you couldn't count change the way they wanted you to count change.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

That's right. So failed miserably, got hit. That is amazing, got a punch in the stomach, and they didn't punch me in the stomach. That's fine.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

But they broke your legs and threw out the back door.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

That's right. A la casino. Look what they did in my hand, man. Uh, and then uh uh just went to telemarketing. I had uh Sears uh credit card uh telemarketing, and so that's uh that was kind of a cool job. That was one of the things where I learned, uh, although I'm not a salesperson, but if push comes to shove, you know, I could I could hold my own.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

You can do it. You can do it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

And you are a little bit. I mean, you're independent uh substantially in the the work that you do, so you you know you have to sell your your services. Uh telemarketing, that's a that's a great one. I I have a friend who put himself through college being a waiter at Red Lobster and selling MCI friends and family as a telemarketing.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

MCI was the other big telemarketing job. So if you needed to start somewhere, yeah, MCI was it too.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Those were dark times. Those were dark times.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Yeah, you know, and uh there was uh there was some guy who would just like run the uh you know, do the programming for the mainframe. And I has as I had my headset and working on the uh telemarketing, I would just look over and I said, Man, that looks like an absolute cush and wonderful job of just like programming that mainframe. That's the kind of stuff that I want to do. So it was kind of like that, you know, clarity of uh vision for the future that I wanted to do.

unknown 5:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

If I didn't take that job, who knows?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Right, right. You wouldn't, you would have been inspired that then with with the vision of a life of software. And, you know, the fast food thing didn't work out. So here you are. And in the intervening years, which have been a few, uh, what in your mind is the most interesting problem you've solved in that time? Now a quick word from our sponsor. Confluent developer the podcast is brought to you by Confluent Developer, the website, which has everything you need as a developer of data streaming sets.com. And it's completely free. We've got curriculum, hands-on exercises, I've got tutorials, online data streaming company. Also free. I really want you to be successful in your journey as a data training company. And this is the site that has what you need. Check it out at developer.confluent.io. That's developer.confluent.io. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

I think there's there's always been uh many ones. I don't think I've ever had like the pinnacle of just like uh absolute success for uh one particular item, uh, but you know, multiple items from you know you compiling your first C code until you get it, right? And uh you have that feeling for it. One time uh there was a little kerfuffle going on with a uh uh company I was with. This was uh kind of exciting, uh maybe kind of illegal. Let's spice up your podcast, shall we? I just do it.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

I mean, I expect nothing less.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

That's right. Got a call at like 11 p.m. and uh said there was uh um uh some some bad blood sort of things going on uh within the company. And uh uh they asked me to uh figure out what I could find. And so uh a little bit of a hack job, I guess, is what I'll call it. And uh it was kind of exciting because it was security research.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Security research, there we go.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Uh it was at uh 11. Uh I was new and you know, just being felt needed uh at a critical moment at at such an odd hour, you know, just that just that dream of it's dark, you're driving down a dark highway. Okay, you're going to you know try to you know figure things out, uh, which should be impossible, but you know, made it possible.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

And uh that was uh can you can you talk about the the you know what what was the security research all about and what did you learn? Uh what what kind of system was it? What did you do?

SPEAKER_00 8:40

No, there was just some uh abusive uh chatter going on uh within the company, and uh and uh they wanted to know what kind of um abusive chatter was going on. So it was up to me to to find out uh on the secure channels which weren't uh absolutely love secure.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

So kind of what kind of systems were they like Windows machines? I'd just be interested in the technical thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

They were all Windows machines, yeah. At the time they were all like Windows machines and um and uh different chats that they had available uh in each of the machines. Uh at the time we had uh uh we had like a wide array of things. Actually, so one of the things that uh that we had was uh uh Lotus Notes, which not related, but uh Lotus Notes, which led me to Java. So everything has just been like a you know stepping stone across the how did that happen?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

How did Lotus Notes uh get lead you to Java? That's that's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

So Lotus Notes was um uh just a document uh system. They asked me to push the boundaries on that, so I guess there's another exciting one. They asked me to post the boundaries on it. At the time I didn't realize, uh, but I knew it was a document-style database to where you could do purchase orders, invoices, and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

And uh we were kind of like a relatively schemaless document indexing kind of system that's it schemaless, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

I guess so, sure. And uh yeah, so uh whatever kind of documents you want, we really pushed the hell out of it uh uh on on what we could do. In retrospect, you know, a lot of this should have been done on RVBMSs or things like that, but uh we try to do as much as we can. And um then uh Lotus Notes was like, hey, you gotta check out this uh language called Java. And uh I had heard about Java already. I tried Java back in 1995 and failed miserably with a uh null pointer exception. I said, screw this, I'm never doing this again.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Narrator, yeah, those who have been the first of many.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

That is, yeah. So the um um uh Lotus Notes was pushing this whole idea, and so I went to a uh Lotus Notes conference, I believe, in Palm Springs.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Uh there was a guy named Bob Balaban who was doing a uh uh Java presentation on what is Java. He called it Java just to be weird about it, which I didn't get, but whatever. Uh and I'm like, wow, that was exciting. I'm going to base uh everything on this new language called Java. And uh so I decided uh let's go to uh let's go to do this and uh try this out. And I love Java, and I decided, you know what, it'd be cool to have like just pure consulting based on this Java. And I thought uh I thought everything was gonna be awesome, but I was just gonna be doing Java and XML, and uh that was it. The future was laid. That that's right.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

That made no sense to me at the time, but uh it looked great.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

So I was like, sure. Yeah, so then uh yeah, from Java uh did uh J2EE stuff and uh lots of excitement there. And I I uh I did a lot with uh scene. Do you remember JBoss Scene?

SPEAKER_01 11:59

I remember the name. I don't remember you never used it.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah, it was like a web framework, and I was like really good at it. Uh I was really good at J2E. You and I, I think as well, JSPs and servlets.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Yeah, that was the start of my Java journey. There's there's I got another episode on I think I talked about that on the other episode. Yeah. Um it uh it it was it was JSPs and and not EJBs, but the early uh so-called Java beans. A strange strange name. Anyway, we we we we don't need to get into that.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Uh but anyway, to your question of like all the different problems, uh many different problems uh you know across you know all these different technologies as to you know what to solve and you know everything.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

You want to you want to dig into one that you really remember and is like a thing that made an impact that that that was hard to crack or any any any way you want to slice it.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

I think I will um I think getting my first you know understanding of and implementing a big data architecture as a uh a really nice thing. There you go. I think anyone who you know solves a problem uh for that um can just about do anything.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

And that's been kind of what you've done for the last 10-15 years with the and when you get that feeling of like that accomplishment of uh yes, I took this you know one message and filtered it, enriched it, and manipulated it, and did all these different kinds of branching until you get to something at the very end that you wanted uh and you create this like living being out of it, I think it's just one of those things that's just really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

So I'll put a little modern twist to it. I think uh I think uh successfully doing something like that uh goes a long way.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah, yeah, it does and that's key stuff, and that that continues to be the things you're involved with to this day.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Yeah, just uh you know, I think there's success in a lot of things and how you go about doing things. And I'm still, you know, I'm still uh learning as well. I think one of the other uh recent things as well has been uh software architecture and designing things right and getting really into uh ports and adapters architecture uh as well. So uh I find that one to be just an absolute great ideal of what software should look like and how to design software so that way it's it's workable, it's maintainable, and it also has one of those things of uh everything is in its place, and I think that goes a lot.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah, yeah. And a little bit relevant to my professional interest, you've done some work with event-driven architecture too, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:45

I have, yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Love it. Yep. I love it. I seem to recall you got some talks and maybe like a class on that.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

I do. I have uh Dev2DEX, which is uh Vencat's uh conference at the end of September, I believe. If I hope I get that right.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Yes, my colleague uh Victor will be there with you. I will not. I I think by the time this airs, that will already have happened, but uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Yeah, so uh an event-driven architecture uh workshop. I'm always excited about it. I've been uh doing it for a while and I keep uh changing a little bit. So the thing where I was excited about, uh told you I was excited about having that uh that feeling of like, hey, something just happened in one particular microservice. Uh, bring that in and like chain reaction, chain reaction, chain reaction. And then perhaps on some other microservice you get uh a different manifestation of what it is that you're looking for and linking all that up, uh just absolutely exciting.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

So that's what the EDA workshop is all about. That's amazing. All right. Well, I I'd say, you know, go register and go there. By the again, by the time this airs, I think it will be in the past. But if you can catch Daniel talking about these topics, you should do it. Absolutely. All right. Daniel, thanks for coming on today.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

All right, yeah, absolutely.