I’ve been hacking things for about 27 years.

I started at 13, during the Geocities and Angelfire era, when blinking text was a design philosophy and dial-up was a scarce resource. Back then I was an awful script kiddie. I ran off-the-shelf nukers, played with SubSeven and BackOrifice, broke things I didn’t fully understand, and generally confused curiosity with competence.

What I did have was curiosity.

Limited bandwidth and unreliable access forced me into protocols early. Telnet, HTTP, SMTP, FTP. Talking to systems directly, not through tools. That’s where the first real lesson landed: the more you understand how something works, the more options you have to misuse it. Forged emails, malformed headers, unexpected protocol behavior. None of it was sophisticated, but it was foundational.

Over time, passion stopped being enough. Discipline, patience, and planning started to matter. Hacking stopped being about noise and started being about intent.

Fast forward a few decades. I’m now a professional penetration tester, red teamer, and author. I’ve worked with people far better than I am, made plenty of mistakes, and learned which ones actually matter. Turning hacking into a profession forced me to care about methodology, repeatability, and efficacy. Not because it’s fashionable, but because without them you don’t get reliable results.

I value good knowledge sources. I still look back at the old hacking e-zines of the 90s with a mix of admiration and irony. They were dense, technical, and often brilliant. At the time, I couldn’t fully understand them. Today, I’m surrounded by endless “learn to hack” content that explains everything and teaches nothing. If you value professionalism, efficacy, and curiosity over noise and theatrics, my content is for you.