Why know a little when you can know it all.

1A DS Lite

It started on a Nintendo DS Lite with an R4 card. A flashcart that let the console run things Nintendo never approved. I was young enough that I didn't really know what I was doing. I just knew the rules turned out to be negotiable.

After that it was Minecraft servers, game mods, game files pulled apart to see what was inside. Different games, same question every time: where's the advantage nobody's using.

2The first real thing

Eventually I stopped asking that about games. The family PC and the router at home were the first things I took apart that weren't a toy, and the interesting part wasn't that they gave way. It was that it had been possible the whole time and nobody had bothered to look.

3The handle

The handle doesn't mean anything, by the way. I needed one, Certifa sounded right, and it stuck. I'd rather tell you that than invent a story for it.

4Next to school

None of this is school, either. School is genuinely useful, and it gave me a structure I wouldn't have built on my own. But the offensive side happens next to it, on my own time.

What I read about gets rebuilt at home, on a Windows Server 2022 domain controller and two workstations. Anything I do more than twice ends up in Python. nmapfullscan.py came out of that, because I got tired of typing the same two commands and mis-copying port lists between them.

5Why this

Why this and not something easier: it's the same feeling as a boss going down in a Souls game. You throw yourself at the same wall for hours, it finally gives, and for about thirty seconds you're the best there is. Relief and dopamine in the same hit. Then you go looking for the next wall.

6Not tidy

I'm not tidy about it. I move faster than I document, then re-derive the whole thing later for the writeup. I've started taking notes while the box is still open instead of after. And I've spent three days on one machine rather than take the hint, which I'd call stubbornness if it didn't keep working.

Which is why the writeups exist. Explaining a chain to someone else is where the learning actually sticks. It's also the honest picture of the job: mostly reading, failing, and writing things down. These are rented machines built to be broken.

7The hard part

The hard part isn't the boxes. It's that almost nobody I know offline understands what I do. The people who get it are online, and they're a lot of the reason I've kept going. And I'm impatient: there are people younger than me with certs and seats, and I don't have the seat yet.

8What I'm after

I'd rather show the work than the paper, but I'm going to have both. What I'm after is a first red-team seat: an internship or a junior role, against something real, with people better than me in the room. Not famous. Just genuinely good at this, and still enjoying it in five years.