White Belt? Really?

Yeah I know how it must sound, after all a white belt is the lowest rank you can get in martial arts. It is only natural people will see the title and think “this guy is probably a little slow, why would he be advertising himself as a beginner?” As a hacker name especially it probably sounds extra silly, so many people have cool names about hacking and zero days and all sorts of awesome hacks. The thing is, what I call myself is not what I want others to call me, it’s what I want to call myself. I do want to be a beginner, this is how I feel as a practitioner of actual martial arts for a number of reasons.

Let me tell you what a white belt is.

Someone who does not think highly of their own skills, someone who is always willing to learn and acknowledge they are no where close to being a master. This is a white belt, it’s the greatest time to be a martial arts practitioner, no one has any expectations of you, least of all yourself. You can focus on just learning and growing and getting better without even caring about proving it to others.

This is how I like to feel about my skills in tech such as programming and cyber security. I am undoubtly better today as a pentester, hacker, and programmer than when I started my journey. I still always feel so much less knowledgeable than my peers, imposter syndrome is perhaps the culprit but I always feel like a beginner when doing CTFs and bug bounty. I suppose some people would be given anxiety with such feelings but I love it, I hate the idea of mastering anything because it means there is nothing more to learn. I love learning, discovering, and becoming better than the day before. Just like my martial arts classes, sparring as a white belt knowing everyone was better than me, it let me be loose; who cared if I lost, after all I was just a beginner. The satisfaction of comparing myself each time against people better than me, knowing that I was getting better every time(despite always getting beat) is the same attitude I want to apply to my career.

Woah, wait. I should probably introduce myself.

I was so excited to explain the background behind my name I jumped straight into that without an introduction. What I am is a hacker, or maybe a hacker? sure would like to be one. I work a job in cyber security but my skills have not been where I want, I have been doing a bunch of CTFs though and I am gearing up to take the OSCP. This blog is my journey through security. I hope that while my first few posts here will sound pretty basic, over time I(and perhaps some other readers?) will see a slow progression to a highly skilled hacker.

Will I ever call myself a black belt?

Well, I sure hope not. As I said before, I always want to think of myself as a beginner, it will always encourage me to learn and grow and never allow myself to believe I am good enough. Besides, I was always told a black belt is just someone who mastered the basics, so I will just keep learning like I know nothing.

What am I going to write about?

The normal hacker thing to do would be to write CTF walkthroughs and guides, but like I said I want to approach things from a learning perspective. When I write about CTFs, it will not be walkthroughs but rather my experience stumbling through them. I will write about what I missed and why I missed things, and I will try to figure out what I can change to do better.

And maybe other stuff too.

I would like to be writing about other things as well, skills I am learning unrelated to CTFs. It would be great to start finding bug bounties and doing writeups too. I will have to build up to all of this stuff. I am going to have to work on writing too, I dont do too much writing and I think it shows. I have a strong urge to just plug my ideas through LLMs to write blog posts for me, but I use them enough; I want this blog to be genuine.

IDK how you got here, but please enjoy whatever I make.

I am not advertising this blog, honestly if anyone besides me reads this I will be genuinely surprised but if you are some stranger I dont know reading this: thank you for reading, I hope what I wrote was worth your time.