This post is Aituweek 100. It's been almost 2 years now that I've been posting my news, my ideas, my setups and all kinds of things on a regular basis.
I've changed a lot over these 2 years, and I wanted to do a slightly special edition, more of a retrospective, to look back at everything we've done so far and what we're going to do next.
I'm writing this one from a nice little café in Paris, like the good old days. It's actually a café I featured in my app Reworker, for those who remember, one of my many projects. It's always cool to come back and work from a café once in a while. It pushes you to raise your game and the vibe is always good.
What I've done in 2 years
I actually started this blog 3 years ago, in 2023. My first post was an introduction of who I was back then. I was 23 and I was leaving for an adventure in Asia to go full time on bug bounty.
I was honestly average at finding bugs, but I wanted to make it and put every chance on my side. So I left with 3000 bucks in my pocket, with one goal: come back making a living from this job.
Speaking of making a living, in the next article I shared my bug bounty numbers. It's not something a lot of people do, and especially back then, few people shared their income like that. During that first year of bug bounty, I made around 10k euros.
That was huge for me and I was so happy to make money doing a job I love like crazy. It wasn't nearly enough to live on, but enough to believe in it.
From there, I traveled a lot, more than a dozen countries, I met people, I got better technically. I did my first LHE with YesWeHack, I met incredible people in this scene who are now friends I go on vacation with. I found a passion in running, and now sport more generally.
I've grown enormously, personally and professionally. Few people believed I could survive on the other side of the world, solo, with no money, a dream and a bit of skill. Fast forward, I now fully live from my passion and everything has evolved.
I went from 10k a year to 20, then 50, then 100, and we'll see what's next. I came back to France while still traveling regularly. I live in Paris, I met someone I'm happy with, I have a life I love. That's a lot of rambling to say I'm pretty happy with the road so far. And this blog, since it's kind of a personal journal, lets me go back and remember all of it.
Okay, since the point isn't just to throw flowers at myself for a whole article, I think we can still pull out a few useful lessons for everyone.
A few interesting lessons
I'm going to talk more generally here, because with how fast everything changes these days, there's no point being specific about bug bounty.
First, and everyone has noticed this, I love diving into new projects head first, going as far as possible, only to drop them 3 days later. It's a trait I have that can be great or really annoying. I've launched dozens of projects and few really stuck, but I realize it let me grow a lot and learn about myself, to know what I want and what I don't.
So you have to experiment and test everything you can to know yourself better. And at some point it gives you a frame, and above all things that don't move. For example, I never stopped sport and running, or bug bounty even with how much it's changed. I never stopped this blog either, even if it's evolved a lot since the start.
Also always staying optimistic, believing in your ideas and your wants, and pushing them as far as possible while staying yourself. It sounds like an insufferable personal-development-guy line, but it's pretty true, at least in my case.
Traveling and meeting people is another important lesson. The human side gets neglected a lot in our scene, but it's actually the most important one. It's what brought me the most opportunities and the best moments. You can be the best technically, but if you have no one to share your wins and losses with, it's useless. On the personal side as much as the professional one. A little barbecue with bug bounty friends talking about our targets and our bugs, that's what gives the most ideas to move forward once you're back home.
So go to events, go meet people, make new friends, it takes you much further.
Another idea is that the world evolves continuously, whether we like it or not. Revolutions happen, and they'll keep happening. You have to know how to adapt and not stagnate. That's what happened with AI. At first I was a bit reluctant, I was scared, then you get used to it and you put things in place to use it.
How I see what's next
Here we are in 2026, everything has changed and evolved, so how do I project myself now. Back then, my goal was to become a top hunter, take part in a lot of Hackerone LHEs, and be a monster technically.
I don't know if all that still makes sense now, knowing that pretty much anyone with a good model is 100x better technically than most people. But staying optimistic, it opens up the possibility of finding even more bugs, and securing the internet while making a decent amount of cash, let's not lie.
Right now I'm taking advantage of the situation, pushing AI to its max while we can still enjoy it at a ridiculous price (thanks Tibo), waiting to see what comes next.
In parallel, I'm still on my running app project. It's been almost 8 months I've been working on it (wow, a project not abandoned), and it's starting to pay off and show a real future, so I'm going to keep growing it and see what I can make of it long term.
And I focus on always growing mentally and physically, to reach the max I can do. I'm detaching a lot more from bug bounty since it doesn't bring me as much mentally as before, and technically I'm mostly just triaging bugs now. But it lets me focus on a lot of other things that matter to me, and see how this whole scene is going to evolve.
About this blog, I plan to keep it going as much as possible, whether I talk about hacking, bug bounty or anything else, hoping you keep following me. And I think we can easily go for several more years!
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