Keynote

Charles Shirer opens the keynote by describing his own search for a field to commit to in security. He recounts trying wireless testing, hardware hacking and ARM assembly, and finding that none of them held his interest for long. Web application testing, which built on his earlier experience making websites, became the area where his enthusiasm stayed strong.

From there the talk follows his path through programming languages, comparing frameworks and weighing Go and Rust for web work. He describes how advice from community members helped him move into browser exploitation, using the BeEF framework and reading browser security articles, and how a new interest in crypto security grew out of decentralized apps and browser wallet extensions. He also mentions an encoder he was building to speed up payload encoding during web attacks.

The closing section is a message for anyone who has not yet found their passion or who feels they have lost it. He argues that curiosity and persistence matter more than an early specialty, and he points listeners to podcasts and resources he uses for crypto and security learning. The practical takeaway is that a practitioner can change direction several times and still build useful skills along the way.