Introduction

As I often mention, the number-one request I get from readers is for my field manual, my personal hacking notes.

Even though I first mentioned it over a year ago (!) in my HTB CPTS Tips & Tricks post, I still receive multiple requests every week via email, LinkedIn, Discord, and Reddit asking me to share it.

Here’s the message I’ve had to send a million times now:

  • I can’t share my notes in their current form
  • They contain exam spoilers
  • They include personal information
  • They contain content copied from paid sources
  • They have lots of typos and aren’t exactly presentable

That said, today I’m the bearer of good and bad news. I’ll start with the good.

The Good

I’m happy to announce that I’ve ported my old CherryTree notes into a web application.

It took quite a while, but I went through all of my notes to bring them up to a standard I could publicly release. I rewrote everything to ensure nothing was copy-pasted from external sources, removed any content that might be considered exam spoilers, stripped out personal information such as API tokens and local file paths, and more.

Choosing and customizing a Hugo theme for deployment also took some time. I ended up going with Hextra and making extensive modifications to fit my needs.

You can check out my field manual at field-manual.brunorochamoura.com or by clicking the link in the navbar, just to the left of “Posts.”

The Bad

It’s not all good news, unfortunately.

I haven’t finished porting over the entirety of my field manual. Many of my notes are still missing from the web version, and even in the sections that are online you’ll find plenty of TODOs and nearly blank entries.

Porting these notes is a massive amount of work, and I’ve only gotten busier over time. I would have loved to publish a complete, polished manual, but that simply isn’t possible right now, and it may be a long while before I can find the time to finish everything.

For that reason, I’m releasing the field manual in a beta state. The main motivation is to have something to share with people who ask for my notes, since it’s clear I won’t be able to deliver a finished version anytime soon.

If you’ve messaged me in the past asking about my notes, I probably gave you an estimate for when they’d be ready. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet those timelines, this has turned out to be harder than I expected. I hope this beta release makes up for it.

Conclusion

My field manual is released. Feel free to use it.