Old Hacker

30 Nov, 2025

So I was over at my friend's place last night. Just hanging out, watching movies, the usual guy stuff.

After giving up on the second or third movie of the evening, his dad walked into the room to chit-chat, and to show me the real-estate software he's been using and working on since 2012.

You see, me and my friend are working on getting a piece of software out on the market ¹. He wanted to talk shop and show me his software.

My friend's dad, we'll call him John, was an office worker. John also had a real-estate side hustle. He'd also been programming long before I even knew how computers worked. So he wrote software to help him manage the properties.

The software as it turns out was an old Visual Basic behemoth. I'm talking years and years of additions being added into the program to tackle some problem he'd needed over the decade since it's inception. Menus, with a myriad of multi-colored submenus and flashing icons. It had a distinct early 90s/2000s feel.

It was hideous. It was also utterly fucking beautiful.

It wasn't trying to be something it's not. It's functional. It was created to serve a purpose and it had been serving that purpose for the last 13+ years. It's one of the most utilitarian bespoke piece of software I'd ever seen.

I asked him questions he seemed to enjoy. We talked about software for a bit. Bouncing ideas off each other. Then he hits me with something I sort of wasn't expecting.

John said something along the lines of:

Information should be freely shared. Always. Otherwise what's the point?

I gave him a funny look. Because I was thinking "Jesus Christ I've talked to this man all my life and I never knew this side of him". And also the vibes he was giving off was some old-school hacker mentality.

The man wasn't keeping track of the flavor of the month javascript framework, he wasn't preoccupied with finding the ideal backend solution. He made the software using the tools he knew and it served its purpose for a decade.

Maybe this story doesn't have a point. I don't know. But Jesus, my friend's dad is pretty cool.

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