Captain’s Log April 2023

April was a great month for Electronics Reference. I published new articles on a variety of topics including Rust, Go, penetration testing, and electric circuit fundamentals. I also improved several existing articles, like the popular Zener diode and Zener diode regulator tutorials.

Site Design and Functionality Updates

I’m very excited about some design choices that I’ve made (along with help from friends and family). These include another revamp of the home page above-the-fold, a new font for the main menu, and improved site navigation.

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t prioritized site design and flow, but I’m trying to slowly improve these things as they are crucial to the user experience. I really want people to enjoy using this site and start to build some type of community around it. So over time I’ve been spending time working on it, and I do think that it’s starting to show positive results.

Programming With Rust and Go

Work has continued on the Rust language course– we’ve published about 80 articles over the last four months! I’m still not getting much traffic to the course, but am hoping that this will pick up as we approach the six month mark (it’s been about six months since I published the first article on Rust).

I’ve also posted a few articles on Golang, and started publishing my notes on penetration testing. At this point, I am not sure of the final format of my penetration testing content, but I want to continue to publish in this field. However instead of publishing my notes as an extended-format topic, I might decide to break out sections into standalone courses.

Penetration Testing Notes and Certifications

In addition to completing some boxes and posting a few new TryHackMe walkthroughs, I also earned two IT certifications in the last month – eJPT and ICCA. These are both from INE and are offered along with their annual fundamentals membership. I am working on an in-depth review of them and will be posting them soon. eJPT is the eLearnSecurity Junior Penetration Tester certification and is my first official hacking certificate! The ICCA provided a great introduction to the world of cloud computing, and definitely made me feel like it might be a good thing to specialize in cloud security. The number of people who are experts in both offensive security and cloud (at an architect level) is quite low, and both fields are expected to grow substantially. For myself, I plan on continuing to focus on offensive cybersecurity/pentesting/red teaming for at least the next year, and then I may consider earning additional cloud certificates after that.

I am currently working through the LinuxAD course/certification offered by Altered Security and am enjoying it so far (I’m about halfway through the content currently). After this, I will be going for the PNPT (Professional Network Penetration Tester) cert, followed by the CPTS (Certified Penetration Testing Specialist) offered by Hack The Box. So I’m currently in a bit of a certification frenzy, and am enjoying the content thoroughly, and trying to become a better a hacker everyday. There’s so much possibility in this space, and I’m incredibly excited about it.

What’s Next for Electronics Reference?

Even though the Rust content isn’t getting much traffic, I still really want to continue to develop new content (and optimize existing content) on the course. Rust is only becoming more popular, and I believe that a beginner-friendly, comprehensive approach is needed. Personally I really enjoy working in Rust so that plays a role as well.

At the same time, I have really fallen in love with ethical hacking and have become a bit obsessed with it. I can’t seem to stop thinking about it, and earning the eJPT really lit a fire inside me to learn more and pursue more difficult certifications. I would absolutely love to do more bug bounty hunting, and would also like to apply to the Synack Red Team – eventually – as I am nowhere near as good as I want to be. But I think that higher-level certifications will be within reach in about six months, and I want to take the readers of this site with me, as much as possible.