My name is Fatos Shala. I did an apprenticeship as a polymechanic, but I already had a passion for IT back then. After awhile I took the opportunity to get a job into the IT industry as a «IT Security Engineer». But my goal is to get into the pentesting/red teaming and one thing on my way to achieve this goal, is THM and/or HTB. Other cyber techies who also do rooms and boxes in the previous mentioned services are writing writeups and walkthrough’s.

Reason for this

It happens more than one time that I thought, while reading those writeups, «How do he/she came up with that?!» and no explanation was given. When I wrote my first ever writeup for AOC 2023 SideQuest I tried to put everything into the writeup. How I came to this solution or where do I found those information, when this was not to obvious. But also I put in all my timewasting errors and rabbit holes I followed, just to show, that it is normal to take long or to fall for a rabbit hole. And? I enjoy it! At this moment i decided to make more writeups. But LinkedIn was not the right place for that. Not only because I cant use markdown but there was also a problem with the code-block feature. The content of those blocks could not be readed by people who are not logged in to LinkedIn. This was not acceptable. I thought about to write blogs on Medium but I haven’t made an account there and also the paywall on some articles which I discovered from time to time, was very unappealing to me. So I decided to use GitHub where I already had an account. And here we are!

My Person

I am a person who is very enthusiastic and curious. I like it to be on my computer, which is a iMac M1 or Macbook Pro M1. I also fall in love with Arch Linux and use it until today for my homeserver setup. What I like about Arch Linux:

• KISS
• You will learn much.
• You will start respecting every thing on your computer, because you know now, that somebody has to code it to work and there is a daemon or something running so you can enjoy this service.
• You know what you have and what you not have.

But I switched to MacOS because on Linux I wasted a majority of my time in working on the system instead of working with the system. And no! This dont mean that Linux isn’t working, it is working just fine, but you have so much freedom and stuff which your little autism can put all the sleeping time into it instead of going to bed. On MacOS in the other hand, you have a perfect system which just works and is unix-kind like Linux and it looks also awesome. The lack of «freedom» in MacOS is just the perfect chain which I need to not waste my time into thing like: «Oh! The shadow of the context menu is not the exactly same like that one for the context menu for global menu.» And no, this was not a small problem. This one cost me the whole night where I solve it instead of sleeping and resting to work on the next day. After I waste days and nights on my i3wm configuration, I realized what I’m doing to my self. Now this problem has gone ;) but sometimes I love to login to my Arch Linux running server and do some stuff.

But I have more than just computing what I love! My family of course and I also enjoy riding Motorcycle. Beside riding I also like to read about motorcycle and working on them by myself. My current bike: FXDLS 2016 Another hobby which fills me with joy is Krav Maga and sport in general. But there is one thing what inspires and motivates me: Stories. They can be in live action movies or tv shows but also anime and manga and of course novels. And ye, I also enjoyed gaming but this is also very time-consuming and can be addictive, so I stopped gaming at all.

I like stories where you got a deeper message or where the message is just perfect wrapped into a storyline. By «deeper meaning» I mean something like:

• Ghost in the Shell from 1995
• Interstellar
• The Buried Giant

This list is not complete. Just a example from the last of the list:

“I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die. When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge. Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant ―

I hope that my love of detail flows into the writeups and that one or two people find pleasure in my work.

Thank You for reading!