[bengalister]

I built a web SPA "crypto" calculator that performed basic and generic tasks such as symmetric ciphering with block padding, hashing with different algorithms at the same time, pkcs7 messages ciphering/deciphering, and utilities like base64 to hex to ascii, etc encoding/decoding, etc.

I did at the time Angular was hot and I wanted to learn it. Also because it made my life easier at my job. I developed it fully at home outside office hours (I did not work remotely at that time), published it on github and deployed it on a personal public VM, and I told one or two direct colleagues about it.

A few months later, some people in the company who I did not know started using it (from the public site, not running it locally) and then later even manual validation plans or troubleshooting guides referred to it (its url).

I noticed through the server logs that it was used from many different countries, it was barely active but still got between 2 to 5 visits per day. And from the location I knew that it was very likely people from my company (no zscaler at that time).

One day I wanted to upgrade the VM and also cut down old sites that I maintained. So I shut down the website. A few days later I received a complaint in my company from 2 guys asking me to put it back on. I had to explain them that no way, I would not put it back on, it was a personal project fully developed outside business hour on my personal laptop, hosted on a personal VM that I paid for, etc.

This could have got me fired maybe, even though the cryptographic functions were really generic, I could have been accused to have stolen company time or whatever. The company was really not the kind to give 20% of our time to work on personal ideas.