It was clarified later that the "hacker" was a security professional who put up all that data on the Dark Web to draw Zomato's attention to loopholes in its systems.
Edit - Turns out the OP's article mentions the same thing. Might as well confess a personal bias - every time I see a Daily Mail article, I can't help but think about how they served as a Nazi mouthpiece for years before the war, so all their stuff's got to be inaccurate/biased.
Unfortunately, this is subjective. For me, it's a combination of both. The other day, I interviewed a lady who'd just started off with her career, working on creating Oracle forms. She hated it. In the meantime, she'd started dabbling with Python. She didn't know what pip was, or how to install Python packages, but it was pretty clear she had a knack for writing code. With a bit of a push, she'd do wonders. So I hired her.
TL;DR - "Natural affinity" should include some level of skill/competence, plus that glint in the other person's eye when you talk about writing efficient, beautiful code.
That's one way to go about it. But sometimes, even a portfolio may not be possible. Maybe someone never really thought about putting their code up on Github. So there are some slightly tricky situations where you need to ascertain how someone writes code without a portfolio or a Github profile.
I'm heading engineering at a startup that works on making the likes of Apache Cloudstack and Openstack work for telecom behemoths. I studied Russian at university. I've been writing code for the last 7.32 years. Personally, I don't care about the nanodegree, so long as the person demonstrates a natural affinity for writing code. That's all that matters to me.
I don't know where you're based right now, but I'd say most recruiters across the world wouldn't understand the concept of a Udacity nanodegree. Most of them don't understand that you really don't need a piece of paper stating that you can write code; recruiters simply don't understand that it doesn't matter whether the person is even a graduate or not, if s/he can write code.
I'd just tell the person to keep trying. I kept trying, and I got lucky with a media house that was okay with hiring me to write code without a relevant degree or experience. I'm sure I can't be the only one to get lucky.
At the end of the day, the Telegram team's responsible for building the code, generating apps and pushing them to app stores. I'd say the chances of the app being tampered with are rather low. Conversely, since the code is out in the open, the chances of vulnerabilities/exploits/leaks being discovered and fixed are higher.
Disclaimer - I'm a regular Telegram user, been using the app for over a year.
I'd suggest you check out both Golang and Rust. Being comfortable with both won't hurt - but if you had to choose just one, I'd say play with them both and then make an informed choice.
Exactly. There was so much hype around Yarn when it came out, and it turned out to be pretty much npm with a couple more bells attached. OTOH, pnpm is doing it just right.
I think the cultural context is missing for you. The article is more an indictment on what it's really like, starting up in a country riddled with corruption and lawlessness at multiple levels. That can be hard to relate to or even arrive at, if you just read this writeup.
Have you checked out [NW.js](https://nwjs.io/)? I'm not sure if it's better than Electron in terms of executable size and performance, but definitely worth a shot.
I suppose I could expose the blessing ID. I could either create a `Blessing` class, in which case you'd instantiate it and have easy access to the generated UUID. Or, I could simply return a dictionary containing the UUID and the blessing.
That wasn't the intended function, but yes - by doing that, you'd end up blessing your code and putting all sorts of helpful checkpoints. At one point, with a bit of luck, such a checkpoint could even prevent your code from crashing - 'cause it's blessed..
http://blog.zomato.com/post/160986258541/security-update-wha...
Edit - Turns out the OP's article mentions the same thing. Might as well confess a personal bias - every time I see a Daily Mail article, I can't help but think about how they served as a Nazi mouthpiece for years before the war, so all their stuff's got to be inaccurate/biased.