Practical notes from my journey in web development, mobile
development, and cybersecurity—written as I learn, build, and improve.
Learning in
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FEATURED NOTE
NO. 0046 min read
Why I started learning penetration testing as a web developer
I used to think security was a separate track from building
things. Then I found a stored XSS bug in my own project and
realised I’d been shipping code without thinking like an attacker.
Here’s what changed in how I write frontend code since I started
learning SOC fundamentals.
It started with a form field. I’d built a comment box for a
personal project and never sanitised the output—anything
typed in showed up on the page exactly as entered. A friend
pasted a script tag in as a joke, and it ran. That was the
moment cybersecurity stopped being a separate subject on my
learning list and started being something I check for in
every input field I write.
Since then, I’ve been going through SOC fundamentals
material and treating every form, query parameter, and API
response as untrusted until proven otherwise. I’m still
learning, but security is now part of how I think about
building—not something I plan to add at the end.
NO. 0034 min read
Porting my first component to React Native
Flexbox behaves differently, there’s no CSS cascade, and every
“just use CSS” instinct needed unlearning. Notes on what carried
over from web development—and what didn’t.
The biggest surprise was that Flexbox is the default layout
mode, not something you opt into. Every View behaves like
display: flex; flex-direction: column unless
you say otherwise. That’s the opposite of the web, where
block layout is the default.
Styling is also done with JavaScript objects, so there’s no
cascade or specificity to fight with. What carried over
cleanly: thinking in components, and most of my Flexbox
alignment intuition once I flipped the default direction in
my head.
NO. 0024 min read
Three responsive-design mistakes I keep making
Fixed widths in odd places, forgetting
min-width: 0 on Flexbox children, and testing only at
desktop size until the very end.
Fixed pixel widths inside Flexbox or Grid containers can
cause overflow on small screens.
Text can overflow a flex child because flex items default
to min-width: auto. Setting
min-width: 0 often solves it.
Testing only desktop and one phone size misses problems on
mid-range tablets.
I’m trying to make responsive testing part of the process
instead of something I remember at the end.
NO. 0013 min read
SOC fundamentals, week one: what I actually learned
Started with the basics—log analysis, common attack signatures,
and why “just monitor everything” is bad advice. Writing this down
to stay accountable.
The first lesson wasn’t a tool; it was a mindset shift. A
Security Operations Center isn’t about collecting every log
you can—it’s about knowing which signals actually matter,
because noise can bury real incidents.
I spent most of week one learning to read logs and recognise
a handful of common attack signatures rather than jumping
straight into dashboards. Slower than I expected, but it’s
the foundation that makes the rest meaningful.