There’s something strangely grounding about admitting you don’t know everything — especially when you’ve spent decades building, breaking, and rebuilding systems.
I don’t walk into rooms thinking I’m the senior. But I leave most engagements quietly realizing I was. Not because I sought that title, but because the baseline knowledge I carry — TCP/IP, filesystem permissions, packet inspection, the old rituals — seems to be disappearing. Replaced by abstractions. Paved over by platforms.
Sometimes it feels like I’m the last person at the party still reading the manual.
Maybe that makes me a grumpy old sysadmin shaking his fist at the cloud: “Learn TCP/IP before spinning up Kubernetes!” Maybe. But I’d rather be grounded than drift with the marketing wind.
So I decided to turn that energy inward. To sharpen the blade again. Not with another DevOps gig or by tuning YAML for the hundredth time, but by returning to something raw.
Hack The Box
I’d had an account for a while — like most tech folks, I registered out of curiosity, poked a few menus, and then forgot about it. But this time, I committed. If I was going to move from builder to breaker, I’d need a proving ground. HTB seemed like the right kind of arena.
They noticed I was a first-timer and dropped me into a tour — a curated path, presented in three batches, through some of the “Very Easy” boxes. Not a challenge, per se. More like a memory test. A handshake with the fundamentals.
Batch 1: The key is a strong foundation
Straightforward — but revealing. They weren’t hard. They weren’t supposed to be. They were reminders.
What I Took From It
These weren’t puzzles; they were signals. Echoes from a time when we debugged login forms by hand and cracked services because we understood their default behavior.
It was nostalgic. And clarifying.
For someone who wandered too deep into DevOps — into the realm of Terraform loops and CI failure chains — these boxes felt like a return to roots. To real systems. To real thinking.
There’s something pure about it. You against a machine. No orchestration layers, no feature flags, no “this only fails in production.” Just an IP, a port, and the quiet question: what can I do with this?