Hello everyone, and especially welcome to all the new people who joined. A lot of you showed interest in my content and it genuinely means a lot.
I want to give you a quick overview of what you'll find here. Today's post is more of an introduction and explanation, and we'll get back to more specific topics next week.
Welcome Everyone
I think most of you signed up because of my bug bounty methodology, which I'll probably share in a full guide within the next two weeks.
I'm so happy about everything that happened. I didn't expect my article on the current state of bug bounty to take off the way it did. I think the honest, no-bullshit tone helped a lot, and that's what I try to put into every article I write.
Other than that, I publish every Wednesday my aituweek. It's a recap of my week, things I learned, and a few resources on whatever I find worth sharing. It can be about bug bounty, dev, building in public, running. The topic is pretty open, but I always make sure you have something interesting to read or dig into afterwards.
I believe we all tend to become more effective by exploring new fields and digging into different subjects. Steve Jobs had this idea in his Stanford speech about connecting the dots. You can't see how the pieces fit together when you're living them. You pick up a random skill, go down a rabbit hole, spend weeks on something that seems completely unrelated to your work. And then one day, it clicks. You're looking at a target, and that random thing you learned six months ago is exactly what lets you see what others missed. The dots only connect looking backwards, but you have to collect them first.
And that's especially true in bug bounty. Doing some development, some DevOps, writing, all of that opens you up to such diverse topics that it adds branches to your skill tree for finding more bugs.
A good example from my own experience: I run a lot, and I'm a heavy Strava user. By knowing every feature of that app inside out, I was able to jump on their bug bounty program and find quite a few bugs.
Being curious about other fields gives you the urge to dig deeper and, more importantly, it creates opportunities.
That's the story of this blog. I started it for fun, to share my travel and bug bounty adventures, and it's now bringing me a lot of new opportunities. I hope you'll keep reading.
The Bug Bounty Guide
I don't want to write yet another "how to get started in bug bounty" guide explaining vulnerabilities and different flaws. That's been done to death and there's already plenty of great content out there.
I don't see the point in recycling and just rewriting in my own words videos or articles that are already well made. So instead, I'll share how I personally work: the tools I use, how I use AI to find bugs, how to pick the right program, and so on.
And I need your help. I'd love to know which topics interest you the most. What area of bug bounty do you want me to cover specifically, what's the most common problem in the way you hunt for bugs. So feel free to tell me all of that in the comments below this article or by message.
I'll go through everything and come back with something cool as soon as I can.
Living Slow
These past few weeks, I stepped away from the Twitter and AI fog. It was becoming unhealthy to check every day for the latest news and feel down about Anthropic's new revolutionary feature or the new SaaS products launching every single day.
It's crazy how much you can trap yourself in a bubble with that platform. And when you talk about it with people in real life, nobody knows about any of it. People use ChatGPT a little in their daily lives but don't see the frenzy, and I find that fascinating.
We're all in our own little world, our own little bubble, and the algorithms are great at keeping us there and feeding it. Same thing with the news. If you follow it closely, it's mostly fear, wars, genocides, nothing but bad news. It feeds anxiety and fear, and it's not good for us. It's been a few years now since I stopped reading or watching the news in detail. I keep myself loosely informed but I try to make sure it doesn't take up too much space.
And that pattern had come back recently with AI, and I'm finally stepping away from it a bit to go back to a simpler, lighter way of living.
It sounds silly, but just blocking Twitter and the news a bit already makes you feel better. I've also been writing a lot more, on paper, and it helps clear the mind. It also helps a lot with thinking and moving forward on ideas. If this setup interests you, I could write a more detailed article about how I use it.
I also went to the opera for the first time this week, and it was stunning. It's not my world at all and I'm pretty far from it, but it was incredibly interesting and impressive. The work it demands, performing opera for three hours without wrecking your voice. Memorizing an entire text in Italian (I didn't even know it was going to be in Italian, that tells you my level).
Exploring other fields keeps putting things in perspective for me, and that's what I love most.
I'm going to ease back into bug bounty after a well-deserved break, fresh and ready to go. I wish you a great end of the week, and see you next week!
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