So go ahead, write your own date library, your own Unicode font rendering, compiler, OS, game engine or what ever else people tell you to never do because its hard.
Doing stuff for learning is useful, and the intent behind this general phrase is to not ‘implement your own’ something which is both hard and critical in a production environment. I work in cryptography (for security purposes) and have implemented quite a few things myself to learn, but I still use stable, field tested, and scrutinized crypto for any actual use.
> People say that about hard things, and I only want to do hard things. Nobody wants people who can do easy things, people want people who can do hard things.
Only wanting to do hard things limits yourself quite a bit: what about things which seem easy but could be improved? I worked in a non-tech related medical manufacturing job for a bit and took time to learn the process and tools. Afterward, I implemented a few tools (using what my coworkers (who have no programming or IT experience) have available to them: Excel and the VBA on the lab computers) to help them prep inventory lists which they have been doing by hand. Doing it by hand took them 3 hours as a group (and the first shift had to do this every morning), which my tool did in 5 seconds with a single button click. They still use it to this day, about a decade later.
This wasn’t something ‘hard:’ I glued a few files together, grouped a list by a filter, sorted the groups by a column, and made a printout which was easy to read and mark on as they went about their day. However, my coworkers didn’t even know this was possible until someone came in with a different skill set, learned what they did (by doing the job well for months) and then made a solution.
You must be careful with doing only ‘hard’ things. It requires other people to identify what is hard! In addition: crackpots do only hard things and believe they find better solutions than what exists so far (without consulting or learning about what has been done). Interesting people learn about things as they are (with the humility of knowing that they are not experts in most things) and tries to improve them using the knowledge they already have.
Don’t waste your time rolling your own crypto when you could do the _actual_ hard thing and identify unaddressed space to make careful and considered improvements.
Stealing security camera footage and giving (or possibly selling) it is a problem. This article tries to make a case that the law applied wasn’t correct on somewhat pedantic terms, but I don’t know enough about the law to know if they have a point or not.
I do know, however, that if you take private data from your employer and leak it (or sell it) you’re not going to be on the right side of the law. I have a hard time buying this article’s point that it was just “violating company policy”
If I were to copy the files on my work device and distribute them, I would be in violation of NDAs which could be pursued as civil offenses. If I didn’t have those NDAs, my employer could try and pursue something in court, along with firing me, but it wouldn’t be a straightforward suit.
None of these are (or at least, should be) criminal situations.