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Camila Vilarinho
Camila Vilarinho

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100 days of hacking

🇧🇷Read in Portuguese here

The #100daysofCode challenge was created by Alex Kallaway when he decided that he wanted to become a better programmer. In order to do that, he made a public commitment to code for 100 days in a row, thus helping him to create a new habit. By sharing about his challenge daily, he ended up encouraging a lot of people to do the same and created a movement of people looking for self improvement that goes beyond coding.

Today this movement encompasses several others challenges in the #100DaysOfX, like one hundred days of reading, exercise, foreign languages and even the one hundred days without (#100daysWithout) to help people looking to quit a habit.

It's proven that making a public commitment improves people’s ability to stick to changes and create new habits. This works very well with me: when I make a commitment with someone it's very important to me to keep what I promised. Even if no one is looking or asking me for updates, if I make a commitment I feel obligated to go all the way.

This is a great thing, especially if you don't stick to your plans or projects for long like me. That's why I decided to start this challenge to encourage myself to learn more about what I've been most interested in lately: Hacking!* 🎉

My interest in hacking started a long time ago, but only now I decided to overcome my fear and really learn more about the subject. My sister says something that makes a lot of sense: "When you put yourself in motion things happen".

And it really happened: when I started to learn more about the subject and follow people that talked about hacking some really cool things started to happen, one of them was being selected to participate in the Bugcrowd Mentorship Program. Bugcrowd is a cybersecurity platform where companies have their bug bounty program to encourage security researchers to test their systems and identify vulnerabilities.

It has being a great learning opportunity, but sometimes work, life and other things gets in the way and I end up not prioritising my hacking studies. So the focus of my 100 days of hacking will be to study, practice and look for security vulnerabilities in web applications.

Motivations:

  • Be able to track my learning progress.
  • Make better use of the opportunity to be part of the Bugcrowd Mentoring Program.
  • An opportunity to practice what I've been wanting to do for a while, which is to write more.

Rules

  • Monday to Friday: study for 1h (theory + practice in labs)
  • Saturday and Sunday: Bug hunting for 2 hours
  • Write a blog post about what I learned in the week.

Goal at the end of the 100 days: find a valid bug 🐞

*By hacking I'm referring to Web Application Hacking, there are other types but my focus is this one.

*I'm also referring to ethical hacking

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