Sharewares got me into coding tbh. As a teenager growing up in India, paying $20+ for a video game was too big of an ask (That was on the order of 1000 rupees a

Sharewares got me into coding tbh. As a teenager growing up in India, paying $20+ for a video game was too big of an ask (That was on the order of 1000 rupees at the time and would pay for 20+ meals at a decent restaurant) and there was no way to pay for it even if I wanted to, as my parents did not have credit cards at the time. So I learned to "crack" shareware, first by patching using hex editors and then using debuggers like SoftICE and Ollydbg to figure out the correct registration code myself. This got me into reading/writing x86 (win32) assembly pretty early and gave me a very intuitive understanding about how programs work. There were also plenty of "crackme" programs to test my skills on. Thank you, "Santa's Secret Valley". I have a great career today thanks in a small part to you!