restart and refocus

11 Feb 2020 - mrtn

I think I’ve written a post like this on almost every blog i ever had - the first post after a long(er) radio silence. This will be a train of thought, without structure - so if you bare with me, feel free to continue reading. I don’t mind if you, dear reader, skip this post.

The last year has been quite the ride for me. I’ve fully transitioned to an infosec-role, got my first cert and learned a ton (thanks to everyone involved at hackthebox, the hack in the box conference, blackhat, defcon, the ccc and linux academy). Despite all that, i also became a father. This still feels weird to type and read…

Of course, this has introduced lots of new things in my life and shifted my priorities a bit. It also made me realize, how much time i spend glued to displays or with headphones in, consuming media, news, theories and knowledge. For example i was pretty proud being able to listen to an enormous amount of podcasts each week, due to the fact that i worked myself up to 2x listening speed. After a while i recognized, that this came at a cost - i couldn’t remember shit about what has been said. But not only there, i also forgot way more shit that i used to. I’ve always been prone to forgetting something, that’s why i made it a habit to write (almost) everything down that i have to do, but i took notice. Not being able to complete my backlog of podcasts also introduced unnecessary stress to my life, so i decided i need to get rid of that as well. I did a considerable downsizing of my podcasts and reduced the listening speed to 1x. Speaking about focus: Everything purely development related got kicked out - it’s too much to keep up with this as well as the cybers. I also unsubscribed from some very long and “talkey” podcasts, as it does not contribute to my focus and therefore distracts me from achieving my goals.

After a few weeks i already noticed an improved focus and i don’t miss anything. The important stuff always reaches you. Feel free to drastically reduce your intake of news etc. This also forces you to focus more. What is important and what is not? With that in mind, I decided to (finally) finish what i started last year - my eCPPT Certification. I did not manage to finish that in time for the birth of my little one, so i decided to start over. Back to square one and study!

To get myself into the groove, I started doing hackthebox again - already got three users, two roots and solved one challenge. FeelsGoodMan!

When this is done, I want to dive in one of the three big cloud providers and learn about building stuff there in a secure way - and probably about pwning it as well! I haven’t decided yet, if it’ll be azure, aws or gcp - time will tell. I’m leaning a bit towards azure, as it seems to be extremely in demand right now…

Guess it’ll be a busy year - I’ll try to do updates from time to time and will drop stuff i learn on the way right here.

cu soon and have a great year 2020!