Episode: 3031
Title: HPR3031: Daniel Persson - Me? Me!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3031/hpr3031.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:26:57

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3031 for Monday the 16th of March 2020.
Today's show is entitled Daniel Person, Me, Me, Quote.
It is hosted by Daniel Person
and is about 19 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is.
I talk about who I am and where I come from and what my interests are.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
This is HBR15.com.
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Music
Hello Hacker's and welcome to another podcast.
Today I thought that I would talk about me.
I'm not used to talk about me,
but I heard that there were a lack of shows.
And I have some show ideas, but I haven't prepared any of them.
And as I'm doing a YouTube channel,
I'm used to actually make content
where there is some kind of knowledge transfer
that you can actually learn something from the content,
but this will not be one of those episodes.
It's just an introduction about who am I and what kind of a person
and where did I come from and so on.
I'm almost 40 years old.
I was born in the 1980s
and I started my interest in computers.
Quite early I would say.
I had a lot of computers at home and in tendos
because my older brother worked on Barry Sola,
which is a distributor for a Nordic Nintendo cluster,
or what you could say.
So we had a lot of Nintendo's at home.
I had an Amiga.
At eight years old, I got a spectrum, I believe, X, Y
and I started programming on that.
I actually wrote my first program,
this Hangman program at eight years old.
And I really was fascinated by these electrical machines
that you could give instructions to
and they did what you told them.
Because I'm the last child in the family
and always been the one that been told what to do
and never have been bossed or bossed anyone around.
So it was so nice to actually as a child
have a computer that you can tell it to do this
and it actually did.
So I borrowed some books from the library
that we talked about programming
and I learned to write some simple programs.
And during my upbringing,
we had more computers at home
and my parents really saw that
I love to sit by the computer.
So they gave me more resources
to do what I really like.
So it wasn't that long after that.
I actually got my first PC,
I think it was a 386.
And I figured out that I needed to have a modem
to connect to other hubs.
I had good friend that actually had a BBS.
And I thought that that sounds like a fun challenge.
So I started my own BBS.
And a BBS is a bulletin board system.
And the interesting part is that you have some node
where you call in to this bulletin board system
with your client.
And then you can through a text interface
do a lot of different actions.
You can play some simple games, text-based games.
You can send some kind of messages in a network.
I think it's like a new group network.
And I was connected to three different networks.
One of those were free nodes.
I think it was called.
And that was the big one where it reached all the world.
And what you did is that you called up to another node
in the network with your BBS.
And then let's say every night you did that.
And you transferred all the messages
on the different mailing lists where you were subscribed.
So you actually got all the communication for that day.
And if you sent a message,
and you wanted it to go over to the US, for instance,
to get the answer,
it actually took several days to get the answer back.
Because you needed to connect to that node
and that node in turn connected to another node.
And there could be sync issues that they didn't receive
that message until after they have called in and so on.
So it took a while for messages to go back and forth.
But it was still much faster than sending snail mail
with a normal paper mail.
So I actually got to reach out
and to know the world that actually write and talk to people
all over the world during my teenage years
when I started to learn English
and when I started to actually get into the business.
So that was a very fun experience.
It wasn't that long.
I think I had my BBS three, four years or something
because 1994, the internet happened.
And we actually got to call into this pool at Telia
or Telia to in Sweden
where you could connect to the wider internet.
And doing that on Windows 95 I think it was then
was quite hassle and getting it to work.
It seldom worked as you wanted.
And the search engine at that stage,
Alta Vista was good to find things
but it was not Google.
Google came much later into my life.
I didn't use that until 16, 17 or something.
But Alta Vista you could find a lot of different games.
There were a lot of bootlegs.
There were a lot of different cracks to games and so on.
And my interest weren't really at gaming.
I really like to look at security, hack things
and try to figure out how things actually worked.
So we had one person at school that actually wanted us to build
some kind of system for bookings.
So you should enter your name and some other details.
And he wanted to actually use that to steal usernames
and passwords at school and changed it up
so it looked like one of the login prompts at school.
But me and my friend we thought that that was kind of lame.
We should be able to do that in more fun and succinct
and more in-depth manner.
So actually create this little tooling that hooked to an interrupt
in the computer and was in the memory of the computer.
And you saw this normal login prompt.
But if you were supposed to enter username
or a password at that login prompt,
we were hooking to those interrupts and actually got the data back
and saved it to a file on the C drive.
And then we actually hooked on the dear command,
the directory commanding windows,
to actually hide that specific file from the system.
So we did a lot of these kind of hackery things
not to be malicious per se.
We just wanted to see if we can make a better solution
than that person that did a really lame one we thought.
So that was kind of fun.
And since eight years old, I always knew that I wanted to
play around with computers.
I always wanted to have that as my hobby.
I swam a lot during my teenage years
and competed both in the Swedish championships
and I have also competed in some world events
and competed in other countries.
And yeah, I would have been traveling a lot with the swimming team
and seen a lot of different countries that way.
So I knew that there were a lot of people out there
and I really liked that the internet actually gather us
together in a community of the world.
Yeah, that was my teenage years and my school years.
And I pretty much worked my way up to go to college
or university in order to get a degree in computer science.
I didn't really know what I wanted to work with
when I ended up being done with that.
But I wanted to know more about computer science
because that was something that I wasn't interested in.
And when I came out, there weren't any job offerings
and I actually started off just playing around
with some simple jobs.
I were fronting or fixing products at different stores
and I worked at the gas station for a year
doing all the night shifts and so on.
So I have that kind of experience too.
But after a year or perhaps two after my university,
one person called me up and said,
well, you are still living in Vecke,
where I actually went to university.
Do you want to have a computer job?
Because one of your friends is here working
and I was like, yeah, I'm still living in Vecke.
Of course, I can come to an interview.
I did not live in Vecke.
So I had to go the two-hour car drive down there
to actually go to that interview and fix an apartment quickly
down there so I can actually start to work.
And that was a web bureau that created a platform
for publishing both your web page
with a lot of different functionalities
and also creating e-commerce sites.
And it was very flexible and they had a lot of great ideas
so I were there with the three other people
to actually develop the platform.
But we did a lot of customizations as well,
four different customers.
And I got to actually work with some pretty amazing customers
that had very forward-thinking ideas.
So I really got a lot of experience
that about the e-commerce system.
Sadly, Vecke is literally in the middle of the woods.
And I got fed up with actually being too far from the sea.
I really like sea water.
I really like to swim.
I really like that kind of an atmosphere.
I needed to move back home to Gothenburg,
which is a harbor town, so close to the sea.
And I got an employment to another work of a consultancy
but they actually had a very large e-commerce platform
called WebSwareCommerce that they sold
and did a lot of modifications to.
And as I did a lot of modifications to our earlier platform,
I was quite accustomed to doing these kinds of modifications.
I dove down, actually got to understand the platform
and how to change it and how to do very strange optimizations
and customizations to this large Java development environment.
And it was there that really dove down into the Java framework
and how to actually build things that were not, perhaps,
intended to be built that way.
But doing customizations in Java is very easy
and it's a very powerful language to actually replace logic
that you need to replace or to find things to actually make
a very powerful whole of an application.
So I learned a lot about the Java there.
And after that, I had a quick work at a mobile company
where we did some mapping software,
or actually navigation software,
so I got to learn about that business.
And where I work today, I do work where we import
a lot of different newspapers, books and magazines
and make them available to the world at large.
And our main focus on this company is accessibility.
So since the 70s, this company has actually created
a newspaper that are some newspaper that you can listen to.
So they take all the Swedish newspapers
and convert them to audio in order to give subscribers
that might not be able to read the newspaper.
The option to actually listen to it instead.
And that actually contracted by law in Sweden
that everybody should be able to get news media in this country.
So we are working with the government for those things,
but the company has grown and now we do these kinds of things
for magazine newspapers and books.
And we also do other kinds of distribution.
So that's the place that I actually ended up and where I work now.
So this was a little bit of a history about who I am
and what I do during my off time or my spare time.
I really like to swim.
I still do that.
And I started a YouTube channel where I have done it for three years.
And I publish a new video every week that is educational,
mostly Java related.
And I also talk about a lot of other different libraries
that I come across or other things that could be useful for you as a developer.
So I like to educate, I like to see people reach new heights
in this competitive environment.
And I really like when some student gives me a message
and says that they really understand this subject now
and they have struggled with it for a while.
That's really rewarding.
So I really like to have that side business is not the right word,
but that side hobby.
So this was a little bit about me and now you know who I am
and why I'm talking on Hacker Public Radio.
I don't like to talk about myself, but I like to educate
and I hopefully will be giving you more shows about different topics
that I could explain well in audio.
So until next time, I hope that you have a great week
and hear you later.
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