Week 0 - 2026

Goals for this year

I sort of went on a hiatus around my final exams. I had finished all Server-side labs + XSS last year on Portswigger academy. I also passed the CPTS last year. I was preparing for the OSCP then but chose to not get it as I didn’t think it was worth it. Read this blog for to read about it. However my goals for this year is to get good at appsec. For this I bought 1. Pentesterlab pro for a year and 2. HTB Academy annual for the CWEE certification. I might give the BSCP certification first though as it is cheaper and relatively easier as per the reviews and the CWEE is a 10 day commitment for which I am not ready as of now.

I had a habit of doing learning in public on twitter where I used to tweet daily about what I did, but now I am bored of it. It is much better I think to write a weekly blog about what I did in a week. So this is it. This is the first (or rather week 0) blog for this year. I will try to post an update on each sunday. I am not making any plans public about what I will be doing next week because it doesn’t make sense for now.

Stuff to do

1. Pentesterlab

I bought the annual sub last year on black friday. I have earned 4 certificates. Introduction, Unix, PCAP and HTTP. I am almost through the essential badge, I am yet to finish taking notes for it.

2. HTB Academy

I bought a gold annual subscription (which is why I am now bankrupt lol). While it is a priority to finish the CWEE, I will also be finishing all the modules I can even if I have to speedrun them.

3. Job/Internship

More on this maybe later but I start an internship from tomorrow that has more to do with network security. Let’s see how that works.

4. Coding

So I wanted to learn golang and python last year. I am going to skip go for now, I am going to focus on python and C++ for this year. There is an epic private playlist for C++ which was shared by someone. I will be learning from that first and maybe just do python on the side. I also will have to learn javascript as I am told it is important for client side exploitation.

5. Portswigger Academy

So as of today I am 54% done with portswigger. I need to finish this as well but it is not a priority as it is free and I need to finish HTB Academy and pentesterlab first as I don’t wanna pay for it again lol. I also have to make notes for this, I have made blogs with walkthroughs but don’t have like notes to follow for BSCP so that also needs to be done.

6. Bug Bounty

I am totally lost on this, but even need to do this in 2026.

7. Additional learning

I also have to redo a lot of my engineering syllabus again. Why? Because I barely remember anything and it is sort of important.

Conclusion:

Idk man, this stuff is overwhelming but it’s also fun. Let’s see how this year goes.