I am publishing an incomplete post on proxies along with this one. Not exactly sure what happened but as I tried to compose that post, I found myself getting uncomfortably frustrated. Angry, even. In the grand scheme of things (and in hindsight), it was always likely that web application penetration testing was a stopgap discipline. The shittiness of most web pentesting tools makes that abundantly clear. There was no point to finishing the post because I learned what I needed to learn: the reason I hated doing that work is because while I was good at it, the value of it was obviously decreasing over time. The only people who respect that line of work are other web pentesters. Everyone else shat on us. Even though the sexier hacking was less likely to be exploited in the wild; that will also change in the near future.

Since March, my life has consisted of building a workshop in my basement, learning how to use unfamiliar materials such as expanding foam and concrete to make art and grinding through Mathematical Foundations 2. I should be done with this in a month. Foundations 3 will likely take the remainder of 2026; after that, Math for Machine Learning. Between concrete and math, my brain is quite occupied.

Over the past few days, it became obvious that the next step is to take a break from most of the the 99 chat communities and private conversations in my life and all of the social media. As the chaos and churn caused by the “macroeconomic headwinds” hits people in my extended professional network like a runaway freight train, I have found myself offering support and encouragement to former colleagues and assorted technerds in these various communities. The whole software industry is pretty fucky right now. Security is fuckier. No surprise there… this is not my first rodeo. The signs have been flashing, the sirens have been wailing and there’s a notable uptick in gnashing of teeth and general hair loss. I picked a good year for a sabbatical. And the more bullshit I hear about, the more compelling permanent retirement looks.

Or maybe I will be summoned one day to help clean up the mess. From many angles, my entire career has more or less been fixing what got fucked up but someone who didn’t quite know what they were doing. No judgment–I can’t explain how I know what I’m doing; I just always have. And it is rarely (nearly never) safe to communicate in anyway to a bunch of ass clowns that they are being ass clowns. The only thing that’s ever worked is sitting patiently and watching the uninformed create tech debt dumpster fires. Yes, it sounds arrogant but I’m totally over pretending it isn’t real.

Where we are now is a direct result of the cohort that claimed it was not necessary to be able to code to work in the software industry or in software security. I still hold out some hope that the operational work that was held up as evidence of that splits off and gets a more appropriate label, but I need a break from the political drama that cohort creates. It’s a smokescreen for incompetence. There’s a Russian word that applies here: vranyo. Institutionalised deception that, over time, compounds into organisational failure. Borrowing from the future to avoid accountability today.

Good luck, out there. Y’all’re gonna need it.