Of those of you reading this, probably few people were around back then, but the first article I published was on June 14, 2021.
It was a review of the eJPT, Deep Hacking didn’t even exist at that time (not even as a thought). It was an article I published on my own Github Pages site (sikumy.github.io) made with Hugo. The page back then looked more or less like this:
It had links to my social networks, HackTheBox and TryHackMe profiles, and my notes, which we’ll talk about the latter now.
After publishing this first article, there was a period of inactivity for several months. During that time, I got my first Cybersecurity job in July 2021.
During those months, the closest thing I had to Deep Hacking were my Notion notes, which were publicly shared, anyone could view them:
After that, Deep Hacking was finally published on November 25, 2021. At the time I announced it on LinkedIn and the blog even launched with 13 articles already written:
Yes, some of the cover images make me a bit embarrassed today, but well, they were also part of the blog’s personality in the early days, right?
In fact, my initial idea was to launch it with enough articles so that the blog would replace my own published Notion notes.
Luckily, some of my coworkers at the time suggested that I launch it already, that I shouldn’t wait for everything to be perfect before publishing it (shoutout to Alex, Santiago, Marta and Alexandre <3).
And finally I did. And thank goodness, because otherwise I’d probably still be transferring notes.
The blog that was published that day is probably the version you all know or might recognize, as it’s the version used to this day, built on WordPress. The only difference is that in the beginning, the logo wasn’t the one you know today, instead, it was the following:
A logo I made with the little I knew about Photoshop, grabbing a random iceberg from the Internet and splitting it in half to place the Deep Hacking letters with an informal font that at the time I thought was the coolest thing ever.
This logo didn’t last very long, approximately a couple of months, after that time the logo changed to the one you know today:
After this, another detail you should know is that at the beginning, the blog was personal, it wasn’t a community blog like it is today. The only author who wrote and was planned to write was me.
It wasn’t until another friend of mine (shoutout to Andrés) suggested the possibility. And also that I realized my own limitations, it was impossible to cover all fields, it’s impossible to know everything with all the depth that I like to apply in the articles.
That’s when I decided to make that change to the blog. The first person besides me to write was my friend Eric. After him, over time and to this day, many more people have joined. I’d like to take this space to, in addition to Eric Labrador and Andrés González, thank Pablo Castillo, Adrià Pérez, Victor Capatina, Axel Losantos, Daniel Moreno, Adrián Díaz, Antonio Sánchez, Daniel Monzón, Hector Ruiz, Ivan Cabrera, Julio Ángel Ferrari, Luis Javier Navarrete, Miguel Ángel Cortés and Oliver Felix. Thank you for contributing to this project <3.
After the logo change and community focus, this is what Deep Hacking has been for these last 4 years. With its better and worse times in terms of activity, but despite that, it has kept going.
And well, what now?
Well, due to my desire to give the blog a facelift, improve it, have more control over everything, etc., for the last 3 months approximately I’ve been developing the new and (hopefully) definitive version.
From here on we’re going to forget about WordPress (and on my end, the expensive hosting €€€). And we’re going to move to Astro.
What does this mean? Well, from now on:
- The blog has a new design, more minimalist and modern than the previous one.
- There are references to CTFd and Github’s commit calendar on pages like the Hall of Fame and each author’s pages.
- The blog’s speed is much greater, right now all pages are completely static, there’s no backend!
- Article images are no longer just simple static elements. Now you can interact with them by clicking to see the image larger.
- Deep Hacking will stop being a national blog to become international. The entire blog with all articles are now also available in English. To help the blog and the authors themselves reach a larger audience (and opportunities).
- New songs available on the player. Listen to the new songs by entering any article and using the player on the right side.
Is this everything? Well no, in order to improve community contributions, Deep Hacking now has a GitHub organization, you can access it from the following link:
Specifically, in the content repository you can find all the blog’s articles:
The blog draws from this repository to display the articles. The idea is that new contributions to the blog can be made through Pull Requests to this repository.
This part still needs to be defined, I have to run tests and properly define the contribution process. Until then, if you want to stay updated on any news, remember Deep Hacking’s social networks:
And if you want to support the blog financially, you can find the affiliations on the right side of the articles. Also, we have a BuyMeACoffee, or as I like to call it more:
And that’s all, I wanted to write this article to tell not only about the new updates to Deep Hacking, but also the story itself to show that nothing is built overnight, projects take time, and you don’t even have to have everything clear from the beginning, ideas change and projects transform. The important thing is to keep moving forward.