Pray for my Python

The journey so far:

This has been a long time coming. When I first got into cybersecurity, I remember a line from a blog about how developers become gods as they move into cybersecurity due to their coding capabilities.

Unfortunately, I started but did not keep up with my learning of python. I could manipulate some python scripts on a very basic level when I tinkered with pentesting, but I could not write code from scratch.

However I realized that I would need to get comfortable with C and Assembly as I started my foray into malware analysis. Cue me starting with C on W3 Schools and reading K. N. King's C Programming book. This was quickly followed by me asking my mom if I ever had a helmet when I was younger.

A few Google searches and blunt forum posts later, I realized the folly of my ways and traded #include <stdio.h> for printf("hello world").

This is where it gets controversial. I studied W3's Python Tutorial, but struggled to understand how these would apply in actual scripts. So I took a different approach, and decided on a more hands on approach by using Gemini's Guided Learning mode to learn.

Disclaimer: I want to stress that I'm not getting GenAI to write code which I pass off as my own, but using it to write a script which I then analyze and ask questions about till I can write my own script from scratch while understanding why I'm writing each line.

Using Gemini's Guided Learning:

In this section, I'm going to summarize how I used Gemini to teach me to write my first script. As I used multiple chat windows over many days for all of this, I'll stich and skip certain sections for brevity and coherence, but the objectives of this section is two fold: (i) prove that I used Gemini to learn and not pass off code as my own (ii) demonstrate to others that this is (in my very nascent opinion at least) that this is a viable method to learn.

Maybe I'll look back in a few years and update that this was a bad idea, who knows. Follow me for more questionable life choices.