Imposter Syndrome in Tech: Notes From Someone Still Junior

Competing against seniors, switching fields, feeling behind — imposter syndrome shows up constantly early in a tech career. What's helped me keep going.

Functional testing tells you if a feature works. Load testing tells you when it stops working. My first JMeter run and what the numbers meant.

You don't need expensive hardware to practice hacking safely. The cheap, legal home lab I built to learn without touching anything I don't own.

Cross-site scripting confuses people because there are three flavors that behave differently. A plain-English breakdown with test cases for each.

Accessibility isn't a separate specialty you need a certification for. The practical checks any QA engineer can run starting today.

After grinding privesc rooms, the techniques start to rhyme. The checklist I run after landing a low-privilege shell on a Linux box.

A test suite that only runs on your laptop barely exists. How I get tests running on every push, with artifacts when they fail.

Mobile breaks in ways web never does — interruptions, permissions, low battery, bad networks. The checklist I run before signing off a build.

IDOR is simple, common, and high-impact — and automated scanners almost never find it. A practical guide to hunting it by hand.

QA and security testing are closer than they look. The testing instincts that transfer directly to finding vulnerabilities.