Reverse engineering is essentially engineering in reverse as the name might suggest. In theory this might mean destruction basically (i.e. taking things apart), but when you are reverse engineering you are doing this in a far more technical way – reverse engineering with an eye to learning or to making something new.
If it wasn’t for this process then we wouldn’t have had half the innovations we have today, and certainly at war time a lot of our most innovative and impressive technological breakthroughs were the result of shooting down Nazi planes and then looking at how they worked. Likewise the Samsung Galaxy tablet probably owes it’s life to a bit of reverse engineering, see if you can guess where it got some of its inspiration…
So how does this apply to an internet entrepreneur like yourself? Well put simply you can stand to gain a lot from looking at your competition in detail, and if you apply a bit of reverse engineering – particularly in your coding – then it’s possible to build on what has come before you and make something even better. Here’s how to use reverse engineering.
Web Design:
What’s the easiest way to build a website? Well… WordPress probably, but the other easiest way to build a website is to simply find one you like and then right click > view source. This will bring up the html code that underlies the site in the majority of cases and you should also be able to find the .css file that way for the layout.
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Now all you have to do is to change the text and the meta tags and to change the images and voila, your very own new website! As long as you change the site significantly enough to be not and obvious clone, this is a great way to quickly make your own site quickly and using the features that you like the most. And if you don’t want to steel too much from one person then steel from lots instead – simply taking the bits you like from each site and using them in conjunction for your own mega site. Drop menus, chat rooms, interactive features… you name it; they’re all just a ctrl+c away…
Coding and Design:
Of course it’s not just sites that you can make this way. If you want to make an Android app for instance or a Java game, again you can just nab the code you want. In fact if it’s an Android app you’re interested in, then most of Google’s sample apps are open source meaning you can change them a bit and sell them even if it’s obvious.
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You can even alter artwork this way, and if you have paint you can just copy and paste some images, add a filter and super impose them over a different background and suddenly they’re unique images.
Learning:
And at the same time this is also possibly the best way to learn, and particularly to learn to programme. The more you copy and paste the more you’ll discover – it’s far more hands on and effective than reading from a book and eventually you’ll find people are copy and pasting your work. And so the great cycle continues…
