Today, I finally fixed my network homelab so that one of my servers can host web applications using the Django framework. Mind you, my professional experience has been more along the lines of the .Net framework, and I even spent about 4 years building a fairly complex open source web application using it. As I went through my book on Django, I kept thinking of the similarities and differences I noticed, trying to recall exactly how such-and-such worked in .Net.
It was honestly a bit of a blow to my ego. The truth is, that while I once knew .Net quite well, my memory of all its features has faded significantly over the years. The overarching lessons are not completely lost, of course, as they make Django much easier to understand, and I have no doubt I could pick things back up quickly if I needed to, but I’m forced to accept the existential truth that a lot of the time I spend learning .Net simply no longer matters, and this is the way of things.
So it’s interesting to think, how over all of these years, I’ve longed so deeply for some level of expertise to put to my name, but it can be so easy to be dedicate yourself to something that ceases to matter in the end. And that’s not a criticism of people who happen to be experts at something, but it’s a deep wake-up call to me how fickle expertise can be.
And I’ve wrestled with this a long time. As I’ve mentioned before, back in college, I would spend time in the library and look up at all the shelves on the second floor and think to myself, “What actual benefit would it be for me if I read all of these?” Hardly any benefit at all, I suspect, especially if we consider the time it takes to read them.
And yet what you know, or what you are capable of doing, has a dramatic effect on how you live your life, and how you earn your living. It is not to say that faded knowledge is some sign that you should never have learned in the first place, only, what if I had sacrificed greatly to become an expert at .Net, only to be where I am now, exiting the software development field? It is, I think, an encouragement to consider carefully how you invest your time.
I donated my CCNA books last week in a weighty bid to focus on more urgent subjects. The great temptation to keep many of these books is that they offer knowledge, but it’s less clear whether any of that knowledge is relevant. I don’t suspect I will ever find myself configuring Cisco routers or switches, and although the other learning material certainly interests me, it is perhaps not nearly as valuable as learning how to network a homelab of Linux servers, of which I have learned quite a lot and for which I’m starting to feel quite dangerous.
And even Django is not something I’m pursuing with great effort, I simply see value in being able to spin up websites quickly, and otherwise being familiar with a framework I will almost certainly encounter when doing security testing. Setting up a .Net site, on the contrary, can be quite the hassle, and it’s much harder to do on Linux, so deciding to learn the basics of Django made a lot of sense.
At one time, I thought I wanted to be an expert at regular expressions, but they quickly grew boring because I didn’t have any legitimate use for them. In fact, the lack of programming in my personal life has been something of a harbinger for exiting software development – it’s often simply not very interesting or useful, notwithstanding the few things I do still want to learn.
And this is all exactly the point, right: what is wisdom? What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to spend your money wisely? What does it mean to spend your time wisely? Everybody wants to throw current trends in your face and force you into a box. They will tell you that waking up at the ass-crack of dawn is the only good way to go through life, that working hard and tirelessly and at the expense of your family is the highest virtue, or that you should choose such-and-such a field because things are going in that direction (whether it means anything to you at all), or that you must follow a prescribed path, because all the ancients have gone that way, and it worked for them, so it must be good, right? (they are mostly dead). But if you start to question things – not out of defiance, but out of curiosity – you can easily see through much of this, and if absolutely nothing else, you often find that people didn’t have great reasons for their decisions, even if things turned out “well enough” for them.
Do I desire expertise because it’s inherently valuable to me, or is it because society looks upon experts as good people, and I came to desire that by proxy? I think it’s fairly common to want to be good at something, but in whose service is expertise specifically intended? Yours, or some greater machine, which takes advantage of experts for its own purposes, then spits them out once the times have moved on? It’s not even clear to me that experts are better off than non-experts, at least not after factoring in the sheer time commitment it requires.
It’s amusing to me that I’m going into a field that actually favors “good-enough” knowledge. In trying to security test many different technologies, it’s not possible to become an expert in all of them, so the ability to use automated tools, while understanding the underlying technologies well-enough to manually test them on occasion, is actually the preferred competency (which is not to say it is even remotely easy), as security is largely a game of risk management, where the cost of hiring extreme expertise would largely outweigh its benefit, at least compared to the cost of catching all the low-hanging fruit, and having controls in place to sound the alarm when higher-hanging fruit is breached.
Perhaps it was fate!