Get the latest tech news

The trap of the top-down approach

As a security consultant you're most of the time forced to do something that no developers do: you're forced to become an expert in a codebase without writing a single line of code, and that in a short amount of time. But let me say that it's of course not entirely true that you should not write code. I actually think part of understanding something deeply means playing with it. Researchers know ...

Researchers know that very well, as they spend a lot of their time implementing the papers they're trying to understand, asking themselves questions about the subject they're studying ("what would happen if I look in a mirror while traveling at the speed of light? What I've seen every talented engineer do when they want to dive into some code is to spend a lot of time in one place, focusing on understanding and mastering a self-contained part of the codebase. The bottom-up approach gives you the illusion that the scope you're looking at is not that big, and so as you focus on what's in front of you you can be more productive by not being distracted by the enormity of the project.

Get the Android app