The hoodies behind Zerocopter

Welcome back to one of our favourite blog series, where a different member of the team is introduced on the second Monday of each month. In these posts, you can find out more about the hoodies behind Zerocopter!

This month we sat down and talked to our Software Developer Mariusz Pruszynski and we are very happy to introduce you to him! Mariuzs takes care of anything that relates to the security and reliability of our software as well as makes sure it is well-maintained by coordinating development efforts! 

Please tell us a bit about yourself, who is Mariusz Pruszynski?

Hi, my name is Mariusz and I'm 36. I live in Poland with my wife and 2 baby boys. Apart from software engineering, my biggest passion is enjoying what our planet has to offer: experiencing new places, new cultures and tasty food. I also love cinema and various sports. My latest discovery is the electric skateboard.

How would you describe your job title in a couple of words?

I am a lead developer at Zerocopter and my job is to manage expectations! J/K, I coordinate our development efforts and make sure our software is secure, reliable and well-maintained.

What do you like about working as a lead developer at Zerocopter?

Being a developer means getting paid to solve puzzles with people smarter than yourself!

How did you end up at Zerocopter? 

I found Zerocopter through Hacker News and I decided to join. The security industry was new to me, so I thought it would be an interesting challenge. I also liked the fact that it's a remote-first company which allowed me to work from different countries.

If you could trade positions with anyone in Zerocopter for a day, what would it be and why? 

If I had a chance I would try all of the roles to get a better feel of everybody's challenges and responsibilities, but since I can only choose one, I'd say that would be a Security Analyst like Lennaert. Keeping an eye on the latest exploits and evaluating real vulnerability reports sounds fun!

What have you learned from working at Zerocopter? 

I learned a lot about security in general. Every year people spend more time with their electronic devices and depend on them more throughout their daily activities. They help us to solve mundane tasks, make important decisions and keep our personal data. It's very helpful, but also quite scary. Both software and hardware become very complex and there are new attack vectors appearing almost every day. We have to be aware of bad actors who may want to take advantage of us no matter if they act alone or are big organizations. We also have to understand that negligence in this field can lead to lots of problems in our "real" life too. So please keep your software up-to-date, generate different passwords for different services, use two-factor authentication, refrain from opening emails from unknown sources, educate yourself frequently and when in need rely only on trusted partners such as Zerocopter :)

When was the first time that you heard about the term "bug bounty" or "RD/CVD"?

I think I've heard about bug bounties around the time I started to develop web applications which was more than 10 years ago, but the term "responsible disclosure" or CVD was unknown to me before joining Zerocopter.

What resources(books/podcast/courses etc) would you recommend to someone (new) in this industry? 

Our industry changes all the time: we want to build new stuff with new paradigms using the latest and greatest tools. It's important to know, however, that most of these things still rely on classic ideas from 30, 40, 50 or even 60 years ago. So whenever you have more time on your hands just learn the basics if you haven't before: data structures, algorithms, software design principles, relational databases, compilers, http, etc. It will pay off in the future.

In terms of recommendations, I suggest following the ideas of the industry's greatest minds. My personal heroes are Linus Torvalds, John Carmack and Salvatore Sanfilippo (the author of Redis).

If you are a part of the Ruby universe I highly suggest reading books about writing clean and extendable code by Sandi Metz. Another favourite of mine is "Understanding Computation" by Tom Stuart.

What is your favourite stereotype about the hacking industry and why? 

An image of a dark room with a dude furiously typing on his keyboard. It appeared in a lot of movies and it's just a very silly stereotype or ... is it? :)

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We hope you enjoyed getting to know Mariusz a little better! Stay tuned for our next post in August!

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