Hello.
I'm NTAuthority, known legally as Bas Timmer. I'm 26 years old, from the Netherlands, and a software developer, or at least, people think I'm the latter. I've broken things, fixed things, messed with things, gotten on a few corporate hit lists, and have come to one conclusion: everything is broken.
Thankfully, that can be fixed - or so I hope, for the good of everyone.
A few formatting hints for reading this page: links, links with hover text, regular hover text.
What I do
I solve problems by creating new ones to replace them. I've been doing software for the better part of the current century, and have developed an obligatory realistic view combined with a vast array of knowledge. Among the things I do are:
- Reverse engineering - taking apart code in order to figure out inner workings and patch it to do what it should've been designed to do. Corporations hate that. I'm mainly focused on x86/x86-64 architecture code, though.
- Windows® software development - and by that I don't mean just 'writing line-of-business desktop software'. I have a large focus on the internals of the NT OS platform and adhering to my interpretation of the original NT principles, executing this through C++ code, C# code or whatever-the-hell might be needed in the future, including knowing the whole chain of troubleshooting tools from COM and RPC to complicated NT system call interaction and custom CLR profiles.
- Web 'development' - even though I might not be up-to-date with all the new gadgets the modern ES lovers bang on about or the latest backend ecosystems, I still pack a few tricks - and I can get things done.
What I've done
Even though I might not have had much professional experience, I've had a whole set of personal 'fun projects' to hang around, some of which ending up pretty popular among certain groups of people online. A friendly selection:
- alterIWnet - the one thing everything built off of, the first sensible thing I did: a community focused around research and development of modified versions of the Call of Duty® video game series, at its peak having ~10k concurrent players, ~150k unique daily players, a large community management team and spanning across 3 games in the series. I did most of it myself, outside of outsourcing web presence and server management.
- fourDeltaOne - a continuation of alterIWnet, but with more freedom and eschewing the completely silly concept of 'equal access but non-equal skill levels' management (and piracy condoned by the aforementioned) that made the former fail. More games were supported, everything worked even better and innovation was around all of it. After a formal request from Activision, I shut down the project.
- CitizenFX/FiveM - a chain of modification frameworks, taking in the concepts of past third-party multiplayer additions for the Grand Theft Auto® series, however basing itself on an embedded layer in-between the built-in multiplayer frameworks and adding features allowing the community to customize both the single-player and multiplayer experience in an efficient fashion. As with the former project, eventually shut down upon formal request.
And, of course, a few lovely side projects I create, track, follow and/or contribute to!
- ImmersiveHost - a research project into running Windows 10 'Store' applications with added freedom, given the silliness of the usual deployment system these applications do. - GitHub repo
- Grit Game Engine - no substantial contribution in code form existed, but I've been tracking the project arbitrarily for a while, and provide counterweight in development discussion. - GitHub org
- KRT - an unfinished attempt at a GTA3 clone game engine to be worked on cooperatively with parts of the GTA modding community. Abandoned since due to time constraints. - Git repository YouTube video
- GBH2 - a pipe dream GTA2 remake/modernization/sequel. Went through many incarnations, but as all publicly available game engines have glaring flaws I spent most time theorizing a core and being lazy. - someone's revival of a prototype attempt from ~2012
- Ayria - an experimental project that I've provided code reviews, developmental advice and patches for, that could turn into a gem for genericizing the game modding ecosystem. - GitHub org
- Referential Integrity Labs - a collective name tied to a few projects and future plans of mine, none of which really public so far. - landing page
How to get in touch with me
I am reachable on quite a few common instant messaging platforms, though I seem to dislike almost all of them. A set of contact identities and significant profiles is listed below.
- Twitter - @NTAuthority
- GitHub - nta
- Telegram - ntauthority
- Steam - ntauthority
- Discord - springboard guild labeled 'pending guild' - message the green guy. (+ a few rants as to 'why one should not use this service' if you do decide to use this means)
- IRC - #fourdeltaone on Rizon, also NTAuthority on Freenode
- Skype - ntauthority
Of course, if you're more into traditional means of contact or have a long-winded writing to send, I'm also reachable by email at bas@dotbas.net.
Obligatory non-professional information
However much it might seem that I am not, I am still a person, and have a physical presence as well. Here's some fun details.
- Hobbies - None explicitly at this time; though I like dabbling in linguistics at times, and pretend to know something about everything.
- Favorite music - No real defined musical taste, and I used to avoid discovering anything as well. Jun'ichi Masuda's compositions are still highly notable to me, however.
- Favorite movie - I don't have a taste in movies either, and whatever used to be here got misinterpreted, so it is gone now.
- Favorite TV series - In no particular order, a few notable ones: 24, Fringe, Person of Interest and more recently Halt and Catch Fire.
- Favorite video games - None, really. Most of them tend to be a waste of time to actually play.
That's all.