Week starting: 12th Jan 2026
This week marked my return from a much-needed break spent doing the highly advanced technique known as touching grass. After a busy year, I came back feeling relaxed, refreshed, and in a surprisingly good mental state.
Instead of easing in gently, I decided to jump straight back in and see how rusty I’d become.
Took me a whole 2 hours to remember the master password to my password manager before I could log in anywhere. Never change your password before a long break. I didnt even remember why I changed it in the first place.
What I worked on
To sanity-check my skills, I sat three security exams from SecOps:
- Certified Social Engineering Defense Practitioner
- Certified Network Security Practitioner
- Certified Blue Team Practitioner
The idea was simple: get a realistic snapshot of where I’m at after some time away and also get done with the looming feeling of unused exam voucher (got more of these stocked up lol).
Key takeaways
The biggest surprise was the Blue Team exam. Despite not doing blue team work professionally, it ended up being fairly comfortable. All the time spent on HTB Sherlocks and digging through research clearly paid off.
It was a good reminder that even when it feels like you’re “just practicing,” a lot of that knowledge sticks around longer than you think.
Challenges and friction
I’m still ramping back up after the break, so this week involved a lot of small organisational tasks and context switching.
On top of that, I’m currently researching and designing challenges for a few upcoming CTFs that I’m authoring, which means juggling ideas, notes, and half-finished diagrams in my head.
Other updates
- Added a Chronicles section to the blog (mostly to organise things… and maybe a little to show off) - Ended up redoing the whole blog site a fresh.
- Started working on finishing writeups for several challenges I created toward the end of last year.
Looking ahead
Next week’s focus:
- Making solid progress on CTF challenge design
- Finishing and publishing outstanding writeups
- Getting back into a consistent rhythm
Slowly shaking the rust off — more to come next week.