About Me
Hi. I’m Frank — online I’m fjlj.
I write software, reverse it when it misbehaves, automate the boring parts, and ship tools that prefer your machine over someone else’s cloud.
This site is Give Academy. The motto is not decoration:
Rule#1 — Never Stop Learning!
Origin story (short)
I started programming at six — BASIC, a blinking prompt, and a kid who wouldn’t leave it alone.
That was almost thirty-three years ago. I never really stopped.
Somewhere along the way I earned a Bachelor’s in Software Engineering & Game Development. The degree named the instincts; the instincts were already lifelong.
If a language exists, I’ve probably used it.
Live long enough in a handful of them — systems languages, scripting, web stacks, whatever the problem demands — and the next one is less “start from zero” and more “map the dialect.” Syntax is fashion. Memory models, concurrency, and why it broke are the real curriculum.
Who I am when the keyboard is hot
At heart I’m a systems person who ships, comfortable anywhere from the metal up to the UI.
I reverse engineer software and malware because I care about restoring tools people already paid for when vendors and license servers disappear. I build defensive analysis habits, tiny native apps that refuse bloat on principle, and offline-first software that keeps your data on your machine.
Give Academy is the public face of that itch: utilities, patchers, experiments, and the occasional long story about why something was worth fixing.
What I’m good at
- Reverse engineering & binary craft — Understanding code without the source. Tracing hooked functions with
x64dbg, ripping into binaries with HxD, metadata manipulation, and protector research when the goal is comprehension, not theater.- Low-level systems & Native Code — Win32 APIs, C++ memory management, stacks, half-float and matrix math from scratch. I recently dug into the guts of Windows multi-monitor support to contribute a fix for
robotjs.- Automation & Infrastructure — PowerShell and fleet reality, secure API-driven data collection, identity and endpoint chores, forms/PDF pipelines, network surveys, and deploying infrastructure via GreenCloud and VirtFusion.
- Learning systems — Neural nets I can step through in a debugger; genetic / evolutionary search when brute force is the wrong shape of problem.
- Full-stack when needed — C++, PowerShell, PHP, JS, Tauri (for when web-tech actually makes sense), static sites—whatever closes the loop between idea and shipped artifact.
- Packaging & ownership — Offline-first installs, honest export, name-your-price downloads, docs that assume a human will actually read them.
How I like to build
- Offline-first when the problem allows it — USB-stick immortality over “please upload your soul.”
- Native / small when the problem is a tray icon or a hotkey — like BackgroundHotkeyThing. No Electron, no 400MB installer, no cloud. Just a tiny Win32 executable doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
- Understand before you replace — especially when someone already paid for the software.
- Labs that lie less than the sample — analysis environments, sandboxes, and instrumentation so behavior is observable, not guessed.
- Ship the zip — setup scripts, version pins, multi-mirror fallbacks, packaging as part of the product.
If a paragraph about half-floats, stack pointers, or a carefully chosen mutation rate made you smile: welcome. You’re home.
On this site
Things you can actually click live under the posts: PDF tools, native utilities, patcher stories, notes.
Name-your-price is the default. Enter 0 if you need the zip. Enter something real if the work helped. ♥
Source and experiments: github.com/fjlj
Notes from the other drawer
Sometimes the work is not a zip file.
The Divine Firmware is one of those — miracles as lessons in science and human potential, fellowship as the load-bearing feature of any civilization that invents hard things.
Same house as the tools. Different fire. Same rule: never stop learning.
Contact
Channel Where [email protected] GitHub github.com/fjlj YouTube youtube.com/user/fjlj This house give.academy · fjlj.zip
Paid software that broke when the company did? Weird binary? Automation that needs to be less cursed?
Send a note. I read them.
Short version
Frank Lewis · fjlj
BS Software Engineering & Game Development · coding since age 6 · ~33 years and counting.
Reverse engineering · systems software · automation · offline-first tools.
Polyglot by mileage. Curious by default.
Never stop learning.
— fjlj / Give Academy