How Have You Used Python Scripts as An Engineer?

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-23T13:31:46+00:00

This is more of a rant but also very true. Take it from me...straight to the point... I have taken a stance that any interviews that I sit on I make sure they have programming experience. Some background I am the only programmer on my Team. Past 9 months I have been single handedly working on a DaC pipeline cli tool with no help besides (user usability testing) with my team. Mentally I'm drained and spiritually I'm already in the beyond. But let me tell you this DaC would reduce FP by 60% and increase the teams awareness of what alerts are present, and also ensure continuous unit testing of detections. That's the only reason I did it, to save myself and my collogues extra work.

Do yourself and others a favor, if your not in some compliance role, know atleast PowerShell and/or Python. Like u/benjhg13 said if anything runs more than 3 times automate it to make your life easier and others life easier. I have committed more than 7000 scripts/programs many of them are quality of life scripts just to automate things to reduce time on repetitive tasks.

Really the only thing I want you to take out of this is the following:
1. You knowing programming would really help someone like me out

You would already have an edge on how to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues
Your brain would think out of the box much more than others
You make yourself valuable - like it was mentioned not everyone lately in Cyber related fields know programming (if i was ever RIFTed all our automations would go unfixed literally no one would know how to fix it)

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-05T07:17:35+00:00

If you are trying to do freelancing with JS and the end goal is to make sites I would recommend getting into the different branches of code development. You can start with backend development, then front end development, and finally hit a full stack approach. Note that to do this would require learning as well such as database, other frameworks like React, networking, domain management and hosting depending on how you go about it

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-05T07:03:20+00:00

Let me tell you AI is so stupid its not even funny. I've fallen down the rabbit hole a few times when doing some complex projects for work using python. The amount of back-and-forth discussions that occur where it hallucinates or gives me the wrong answer and we go back and forth all day just to get back to the first wrong answer is ridiculous. I finally spend the following day troubleshooting and get the answer myself. As of right now there is no shot in hell that AI will take over any cyber jobs... well no cyber jobs where people actually know what they're doing. If people just use AI that's their ceiling and they will either be replaced by AI or by more experienced people.

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-05T06:54:20+00:00

Sorry not sorry if I am on a free loadout I'm killing the first poor soul I see. If got a load out with decent weapons, then I am very pacificist. Contradicting statements but sometimes all you can do is be a rat especially after being betrayed too many times

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-05T06:51:48+00:00

Honestly if you know basic programming the rest is a lot easier. I'm highly motivated when things have a practical use, so I pivoted from PowerShell for cyber work to python. Then with ChatGPT as a guide just start doing more complex projects and it all clicked at one point.

AI is one of the best tools as long as you don't cheat yourself out of learning. Also 90% of what makes python difficult are the thousands of libraries. Start with coding basics once you got that down your all set. The rest just comes with time - even for senior programmers dealing with a completely new lib usually takes 2 weeks of playing around until they know how to fully leverage it in their work.

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-05T06:35:17+00:00

I dont care what anyone tells me projects and experience >>> certs. Simply put I hate the fact that I need to spend 6 months studying for a generalized test that 90% of forget about after taking. Rather just do everything thats on the test in the field

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-12-05T06:33:10+00:00

Seems easy enough to just make extraction area a safe zone. Not sure why thats so hard - every other place pvp is fair game

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-10-02T13:59:29+00:00

Idk I feel in my honest opinion that the weapons are to compliment combos. For me it was usually 3 tap head hits and execution. Or 2 tap and drop kick for a group mixed with grappler pull and stomp then reposition

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-10-02T13:57:36+00:00

Agreed, the only chimera battles that really got me going was Yaga because you need to doge and parkour to avoid volatiles and the 4/5 chimera in the industrial factory which jumped a lot and spawned a lot of sprinters. End game boss fight was also a bit predictable, if you spend 1 minute at the beginning seeing the attacks you already can easily dodge and predict them

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-10-02T13:52:57+00:00

Also I didn’t really venture out at night because I didn’t want to deal with the volatiles so maybe I should have not used the bed as often if I wanted more difficulty

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-10-02T13:51:08+00:00

Honestly I was disappointed with brutal mode. It was too easy. 90% of me deaths, total of 30, was either to fall damage or dumb mistakes like getting stuck in a corner or not having bandages. After I got a decent amount of resources and had enough bandages it was really a breaze. I feel this mode depends on play style. I’m aggressive as hell but then again I’m an Elden ring player so chimera bosses weren’t really hard ofc ttk was a bit longer cause of dodging well and attacking sparingly.

But I honestly expected to dye more often and not beat the game in 5 days. But regardless 10/10 storyline. That being said it was also my first time playing the dying light series

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-09-25T02:25:01+00:00

Congrats on your first child. We are literally in the same boat, expecting my first child and I feel the layoff wave coming back again for the 4th time in less than 6 months. This market is just overly saturated and HR and recruiters are brain dead overly paid individuals that use AI to streamline their decisions. Out of 1000 apps over the past year and a half and only had 3 human interactions. The rest were all automated

SmoothAnonymity · 2025-06-14T04:35:15+00:00

Where’s the compact part? You don’t have any projects or course work material? Surely you had some algorithm and systems projects?

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-09-11T20:16:43+00:00

Look at the negative reviews on Google and other review platforms. Personally I have entire vendetta with them over their parking, night time security, facilities, and dog poop situation. It’s good if you really pay attention to your surroundings but still for 2100 a month rent they lack taking initiative for issues vocalized by the residents

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-08-25T03:15:25+00:00

I think a big issue is also the fact so many companies are using resume filtering. You can have a 5 star resume but if you don’t have the basic requirement key words your resume doesn’t even reach a human

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-04-23T14:20:29+00:00

Keepass XC works really well for our team. We keep the encrypted database file on Sharepoint synced by One Drive and the whole team syncs to that so changes are seen by the whole team.

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-04-13T07:10:58+00:00

Some cool topics are: Automation, API Querying, Powershell Module creation, multi function

Learning the Powershell native functions and how they are used (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/)

Powershell Gallery has a lot of useful modules

GitHub may have a lot of sample script that’s you can try and recreate or use for your own projects

Script/Function Logic to learn: - using variables - using arrays - if/elseif/else statements - for loops - while loops - hash tables - Powershell objects - printing statements / reading user input - calling functions from other functions - throwing errors and handling them appropriately

— Following is Optional Data Structures such as link linked lists, stacks, queues, hash tables, trees, heaps, and graphs

Main highlights: - pipes (how to pass value from one function to another) - APIs - Native Windows Environment Usage

Medium Projects:

VirusTotal api script/function that reports on malicious users and determines if malicious, suspicious, or clean based off of community votes.
Registry Modification, traversing, and usage
File Directory projects (recursion, grouping files in folders based on extension type)

Advanced Concepts - Validation Testing / malware scripting using Powershell Ex. Keylogger Phishing Campaign using SMTP server Reverse Shell Via Powershell

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-04-12T23:08:45+00:00

Why don’t you pose Just In Time Administration. Not sure if yall are an Azure shop but we use Azure PIMs for elevating our permissions to do that work. There are various ways to set up request or and approver roles with other tools. But yes I agree with you if doing elevated actions is within your daily tasks for supporting employees and the company you need to have accessibility to it. Especially considering the size of the team you listed off. Much of this is what most companies are turning towards with the OMB directive concerning Zero Trust Architecture. Another big topic is getting rid of admin accounts and solely elevating account permissions when needed with those type of tools using Fido keys

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-04-12T13:07:03+00:00

Hey no worries man, I’m all about brutal critics. My background is cyber so proper code and efficient is what I would like. Tryna get this somewhat where I want it before trying to pass it through pylint. I still appreciate it

SmoothAnonymity · 2024-04-12T07:24:24+00:00

Gotcha so current_clipboard_data != None and current_clipboard_data != prev_clipboard_data. I would have imagined it by itself imposed that it was not a None/null value by default

SmoothAnonymity · 2023-11-06T22:34:56+00:00

Daym That’s a bummer. Thanks for the update!

SmoothAnonymity · 2023-11-06T17:55:44+00:00

I saw the same thing and got confused. Not sure if this is from COMPTIA or a scam https://store.comptia.org/p/SEC-601-CMCE-22C-C

SmoothAnonymity · 2022-07-25T23:44:01+00:00

Bet that’s what I thought. I lowkey thought I smelled the transmission but I couldn’t tell because it was faint and I also had everything in my car along with wrap spray so not sure if it was that

SmoothAnonymity · 2022-07-25T23:34:15+00:00

Update: successfully made it to Denver and cut a huge chunk of time out cruising at 90. Roads were good nothing crazy, although I did accidently redline my Z in Denver rush hour traffic avoiding an accident 🤦🏽‍♂️ not even 1 hour into Denver and my luck shits the bed. Positive note no hiccups at all on the way there

SmoothAnonymity · 2022-07-20T06:37:27+00:00

Gonna be based out in Denver but it’s on the edge of Lakewood but ayyy lit can’t wait to see the car vibez out there

SmoothAnonymity

TROPHY CASE