It struck me today that what I really love about Linux and cloud-native stuff is that feeling of hacking something, after all, the process of hacking is learning through trial and error what will and won’t work and then exploiting that.
The difference is that instead of “exploiting” you are deploying and building and remediating. I think that has always been the draw to systems operations things for me. Every time there is something to be done (proactively or reactively) there’s the excitement of solving the puzzle, uncovering the clues, and ultimately winning the quest.
Suffice it to say, I’m so glad I stayed with infrastructure engineering and cloud-native applications development instead of going 100% into security professionally.
As I’ve noted before, what I’m doing now has zero documentation requirements (well not zero) compared to what people being paid to hack professional mostly have to do. I have yet to meet a professional hacker who doesn’t complain about writing reports. And I have met not a few, um, not professional hackers who laugh at those who have to give up all their skills learning time doing that, because they don’t. The only thing “recreational” hackers write down is stuff in their own black books for reference later. Hell, they don’t even share what they learn. It’s an ongoing competition, which, again, is why I’m no longer as intrigued by the cybersecurity field at any point on the greyscale spectrum. Maybe a little for fun, but too many other fun and creative things to do (at the moment).