I recently spent a few days poking around the network protocol that the Line 6 Helix Stadium XL uses to communicate with its editor software. It started as idle curiosity during the Christmas break and turned into a proper reverse engineering session. By the end I had mapped out the message format, figured out how model IDs work, and learned enough to build my own tooling if I wanted to.
With Christmas approaching and work stopping for the year, naturally with more free time what does a developer with a brand new Helix Stadium XL do when they see the editor communicates over WiFi for editing? You go digging into how it works and here’s what I’ve discovered. I really should be drinking eggnog and doing nothing, but as other devs know it’s hard to stop sometimes, haha. I like to keep busy.
Almost two years ago I deactivated my LinkedIn. Not paused. Not lurking. Gone. I have not missed it for a single day. I have never received a real opportunity through LinkedIn. The good work in my career has come through people who know me: former clients, colleagues, friends of friends. Conversations, coffee, shipping things together. In Australia especially, our circles are smaller than you think. Reputation travels faster than an algorithmic feed ever will.
For the past ten years, every good opportunity in my career has come through people. Former clients who referred me. Colleagues who remembered a job I did well. Friends of friends who needed help and trusted the recommendation. In Australia especially, the circles in tech are smaller than you think and the degree of separation is tiny. If you build real connections, you can often sidestep the mess that is interviewing and get hired for the work you actually do, not for how fast you can solve an algorithm on a whiteboard. I am genuinely grateful for that.