I sit here, having finished my fifth apprentice level lab on PortSwigger Academy and realizing I’ve met some of my goals but have failed to keep up with my blog already. I haven’t been feeling well and decided that I’d try something new: actually learning how to fight.

Though I’ve attended some Muay Thai classes in Austin some years prior, this was a whole different beast. My wrist hurts from realizing years of coding have not been well to my forearm strength and thus, my punches hurt me probably more than the potential person on the receiving end :’).

But alas, this isn’t a personal blog, but a personal…tech journey blog? Anyway, this ties into that well actually. Upon reaching some of goals in tech this year (namely, finishing the Rust Programming Language book, uploading a cargo library with 100+ downloads, and making a blog) I realized I don’t know how to make a secure application. Hell, I don’t even know how to know if any of the apps I would make would be secure. Basically, even on the computer I don’t know how to fight yet. Thus, I’ve made the decision to make some changes to my focus for the remainder of my goals this year. I’m prioritizing security as a focus, moving my 2023 goal from my previous post into the remainder of 2022. It’s a lofty one for sure, but I’m going to attempt to submit a bug bounty on HackerOne.

But before this is possible, I’d like to finish the labs on Portswigger Academy (total of 218 at the time of writing), become a Burp Suite Certified Practitioner, then attempt to submit a bug with the remaining time in 2022. If all goes well, learning how to offend/attack in real life should be cohesive to me learning how to do so on my MacBook. Shout out to “How To Become a Hacker” by Eric Steven Raymond for giving me this idea of joining martial arts while learning how to hack about a decade ago when I first decided I wanted to be a software engineer.

Regarding goals, I’ve accomplished 3/7 and we’re just over halfway done with the year so I’d say that’s pretty ok though I gotta hustle. Learning React will have to take a backseat for now to be honest though since I’m just gonna use Angular for the oncologist researchers tool (that I haven’t updated in months)…

So the goals for the remainder of the year in order:

  • Submit a Hacker101 bug bounty
  • Publish major release of oncology research tool
  • Complete Solana documentation

Hope my wrist doesn’t feel like shit in the morning.