I was thinking about the tools and systems and general knowledge that I use on a daily basis, and thought is would be a good exercise to document them here:

Computer Systems:

• Quad Core Q6600 Vista 64 Workstation 8GB of RAM
• Apple Macbook with 4GB RAM
• VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion (running various linux distros and Win XP images)
• Large Monitors 24″ +

Software:

• A good text editor – UltraEdit, TextMate or vim
• A good hex editor – UltraEdit, hexdump, hexedit or vim -b
• ssh client – PuTTY or OS native ssh clients
• svn client
• NetCat - to pipe binary message dumps to simulators, and to create listening servers to accept message dumps.
• Client and Server Simulators — write your own!
• Calculator — the DEC to HEX and HEX to DEC functions are great for header lengths – if you are a real geek you have a HP-16c
• Instant Messenging clients and Skype to communicate with your team.

Knowledge:

• Ability to read — seriously, read those specs!
• ISO8583
• TCP/IP Socket programming – both Client and Server
• Database programming experience e.g. SQL – and other O/R Mapping tools – Understanding the I/O requirements between write intensive OLTP and read intensive Data Warehouse data stores.
• Payment Processing 101 knowledge
• Data Encoding techniques and character sets and numbering systems – ACSII, EBCDIC, BCD, Binary etc.
• Basic understanding of Encryption, including symmetric, asymmetric, PIN encryption , PIN translation, and DUKPT
• Basic understanding of IT Security
• PCI and PABP/PA-DSS requirements – review the audit procedures !
• How to use Google
• Ability to read — Note: This is intentionally listed twice

Possibly Related Posts (automatically generated):

1. You don’t know until you know (or go into Production)