How I Came to Understand Reverse Engineering

One morning, I was watching a YouTube video that explains how a specific library works, and I heard the term "reverse engineering". It was new to me, so I decided to search on Google to understand what it means, especially in the context of software engineering. After reading a few articles on various websites, I came to understand the concept, but only in theory.

This week, however, I was assigned a task to integrate third-party software into an API so we could use the services of that software. The CTO even provided me with an example code snippet, which included a parser along with some example configurations. I started working on the task, and as I was figuring out the configurations that would fit the integration, I discovered that the parser provided by the CTO was from a different software, one that only serves as a cloud solution but the third-party software I needed to integrate was self-hosted liket they were two separate pieces of software.

So I checked the codebase of the third-party software and found that no such cloud services were being used. Then I starting to confuse that perhaps the CTO had given me the wrong code snippet or something. However, I decided to try the parser anyway, and it worked suprisingly. After completing the task, I asked the CTO how a parser from a cloud-based software become compatible with that third-party different software, and he explained that it was the "reverse engineering".