@0xMinhT
Last updated
Last updated
A wise person once said: work, work, work, work, work, work
It was Rihanna.
"Idk man, you just need to put in the work" is like the most generic thing you could tell someone who wants advice on how to get gud (at anything), but sadly the answer is as true as it is unsexy.
I like to consider myself fairly smart. I had an easy time in school and university, I could half-ass most of it and still get very good grades. I had to learn the hard way that this mentality does not transfer to the security research space.
This place is filled with giga-brains, and the only option for most people to get anywhere close in terms of skill is to outwork them.
If you are you are far enough to the right of the intelligence curve you may be able to get away with it, but for most people I don't believe its an efficient way to go. Obviously reading code is the majority of the job, but for those who are not blessed with extraordinay mental RAM, there is no shame in:
reading the docs to get a high-level understanding first
taking notes and drawing diagrams
using an IDE and learning to use it properly
(especially in regards to navigating and searching code)
I am a massive sucker for FOMO. I can not count the times where I tried to do contests in parallel or when I was planning to do a contest in the final third of the time available just so I could do another one before that, for which I also only allocated a fraction of the time I should have. Needless to say I did not perform well doing this, ever. Remember how I said earlier that I consider myself smart? It's moments like these that make me question if I don't have a learning disability instead (like in the Simpsons episode where Lisa tests if her brother is ) Learn from my mistakes and dedicate yourself to one codebase at a time for as much time as necessary until you understand how everything works.
, but it's just that.
