Being obsessed with something, Kaizen and learning by building

I'm still in Japan, and last week, I mostly visited Osaka and Kyoto. It was quite nice, and different from Tokyo. Not a lot of buildings and it's calmer ( except in tourist places ).

Today, I want to discuss more about the fact of being obsessed with something. It's more of a brain dump than a factual written essay about that, but it's my actual thoughts.

When I'm traveling, I'm not like actual visitors. I don't care about visiting all the tourist places. I've already seen most of them on the internet, and everyone has the same Instagram picture. And I'm doing the same when I face something famous or good-looking, I'm posting it.

But most of my friends don't understand me. When I land in Tokyo, the only stuff I want to do is go to a 7eleven eat what I love, go to a place to work on my stuff, and not see the famous temple everyone goes to. Maybe I miss something, and I don't even care.

It was the case last week with my friend. I went with her to visit some temple in a mountain, and she was bored seeing me speedrunning it, simply because after seeing it, I'm good and I don't need to stay for a long time looking at it. I was more interested in the view on the top of the mountain, or the walk in the forest. It can be paradoxical taking a flight to the other side of the world to only do what I can do in my hometown, but that's how I work.

Speaking about something else, I love being obsessed with something. For me, there are two kinds of people, those who like testing a lot of stuff and being good/average at them. More like Leonardo da Vinci, who was looking at so many fields. And it's actually a good way to think. The other side is being an expert, obsessed with a domain, and mastering it. Both are very good, but I still prefer to tend to be obsessed with something.

And looking at my past years, I always tried to give everything for only a few stuff. Actually, for me, it's about security and more specifically cryptography. I fell in a world that I love so much. It's so interesting, I'm reading a lot of books about how it works, and how to master it at some point. And I know that it will help me a lot in Bug Bounty to search for newer categories of bugs.

To take the example of Bug Bounty, being average at everything will get you a lot of bugs, medium ones. And being specialized only a few but with probably higher impact. Two worlds that work, it's only a choice. I like this graph from Yassine Aboukir at a conference :

It shows us that there are multiple ways to achieve this goal.

And I'm doing the same in sport. I want to master, and be the best I can do in running before going to something else. It can be hard sticking with the same stuff every time, but in the end, it will not be a pain anymore as it will become a habit.

Kaizen

Last weekend, the French YouTuber Inoxtag released his documentary about his ascension of Mount Everest, a video of 2h30 relating the story and his preparation.

The video is also available in English for those interested :

To me, the video is insane, the editing is crazy, and the story too. And I want to talk more about that, simply because there are huge debates, especially on X.

A lot of people didn't trust him at first when he wanted to climb it. But he finally released it after a year of hard training. Now people are arguing that this is just a rich whim, that he forgot about all the people helping him like the Sherpa, and stuff like that.

And I found it crazy that people ( especially the French ones ) are never happy with the success of other people and they will always find something to tell. And I hate this mentality.

The message behind this documentary is wise and beautiful. Finding a dream and making it real. For sure, it's simpler when you have the funds to help you, but in the video, he never tells us to make this kind of stuff. It's more about the Shonen spirit of pushing yourself hard to achieve stuff.

Learning by building

To help me master cryptography, I'm currently reading a lot of good books, and they are crazy and well-made.

But I will not be good by only reading them. So I also decided to take my hands on and build something to help me. There are challenges to understanding some crypto vulnerabilities by implementing them called cryptopals :

The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges

Thomas Ptacek, Sean Devlin, and Alex Balducci

I don't want to only stick to them and write code to just finish the challenges, it will not be helpful for me, and I can find plenty of solutions online.

So I decided to make, for me, a library that will help me solve most of the crypto-related bugs and help me in CTF and bug bounty by directly having a cli to solve them.

I'm doing it in Golang to help me master this language too.