A buddy of mine and I were talking one day about businesses. Working with them, partnering with them, and more importantly .. starting them. There's a famous saying, "ideas are a dime a dozen, everyone's got one and none of them are of any value". Finally, after years of watching fad's come and go- I get it. Something like 90% of new businesses fail in the first few years, not because their ideas were bad, but because of three things- market timing, money and execution.

If you run an open-source project, you have no time to spend on testing deployments- so you AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS, from testing to install, across as many platforms as you possibly can.. because if you give folks documentation, they will not read it, but if you give them an easybutton- they'll BASH THE HELL OUT OF IT. What you quickly figure out- is how many different ways they'll then want to bend, tweak and scale out your application. This leads to more questions, more answers, more time (did I mention you're not really making any money from this, it's all goodwill...  you learn a lot, but you also lose a lot of time with your family... depending on your situation, maybe good, maybe bad).

For anyone that's ever tried, there's no 'one way' to parse email, it's one of those long standing protocols that was developed during a different period of time, is extremely resilient, can carry just about anything, works across different encodings, systems and will do just about anything you want it to. The very thing that makes it so versatile- is the very thing that makes it extremely difficult to parse- well. Transporting email is easy, most of the headers and other implementation details in the RFC define that pretty well. It's what IN the messages that's important (and hard)....

I've been writing threat intel parsers for over a decade. In fact, i've made a pretty decent living at it, and i've pretty much seen it all- illegal XML, JSON with XML in it, CSV with tabs in it, pipe delimited 'CSV' with tabs in it and plain text that looks like .. it was written by my 3y/o son....

One of these things is not like the other...

I am a trader.

Not in the Wolf of Wall-Street sense (hookers and blow really aren't my thing), but in the “I make about 3,000 trades a year against my house and my family’s future” kind of sense. I’m part of a growing segment of the population that sees things in the world- then immediately checks the volatility futures to see whether “the community” is freaking out over something that most of the world truly cares about (eg: are people selling this news?).....