“Who is my neighbour?”

A developer was working in an Object-Oriented programming language when their software was hacked. In a panic and not knowing what else to do, they put out an appeal to any other developers to help.

The first person to hear of the problem was a developer who only worked in purely functional languages. They were overheard mumbling something about avoiding null-reference exceptions but didn’t do anything to help.

The second developer to see the request for help spent their days writing C and Assembly code. They started to write a reply about how they never have to deal with problems like this but decided against sending it.

The third person to hear about the hack had development skills that extended as far as copying snippets of Javascript and PHP from other websites. Never the less they did all they could to help. Recognizing the limitations of their ability to help directly, they reached out to other developers they knew with skills that might be able to help. After addressing the immediate threat, they paid for a security expert to review the software to try and avoid any future problems.