🔥 RAT MODE: ACTIVATED (I got no enemies, i got too many friends) 🐀

Faizan Zahid

Full Stack Security Rat Engineer

Welcome y'all take a peak inside my demented schizo mind, hope you enjoy this tomfoolery that I made one fine night in a state of alcohol induced ecstacy.
The rats are nice they can't hurt us, and they have a mean "odour" and "nasty habits"

Currently dealing with EASM, DMARC pipelines that don't crash (often), and optimizing my spinning rate.

WHAT_I_TOLERATE.LOG THE_TRAUMA.TXT

CORE COMPETENCIES (VERY LEGIT)

Things I'm good at because I've claimed eough times that I am good at so people believe me now.

EASM & DISCOVERY

I build scanners to find things you forgot you put on the internet. Yes, I found that dev server you left open in 2019. It had Trollface as the favicon.

• Asset Discovery
• Cloud Integrations
• Vulnerability Mapping

DMARC & THREAT INTEL

Optimized report pipelines so we can ignore spam faster. Built a threat map because executives love shiny moving dots. Look at the wolf dance!

• Email Security
• Real-time Analytics
• Threat Visualization

HIGH PERFORMANCE

Writing Python scripts that run for weeks without leaking memory (mostly). Building microservices because monoliths are "so 2015".

• ETL Pipelines
• Microservices
• System Optimization

THE TRAUMA (SURVIVAL GUIDE)

Full Stack Software/Security Engineer (Pied Piper)

Jun 2024 – Present

CTM360 • Manama, Bahrain

DMARC Pipeline Optimization: Made it fast enough that nobody notices when it breaks for 5 minutes.
Threat Intelligence: Built a map to show people where the bad guys are (spoiler: they're everywhere).
Internet-Scale Scanning: Scanning the entire internet because asking nicely doesn't work.
Cloud Integrations: Wrote connectors for every cloud provider because standards are a myth.
Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK, because clicking buttons in the console is for amateurs.
Data Analytics: Elasticsearch queries that look like ancient hieroglyphs.
Microservices: Created an "Event Tracker" so we know who to blame when things go wrong.

Backend Software Engineer (Team Lead (Reluctantly))

Jan 2023 – May 2024

Devex IT • Lahore, Pakistan

Team Leadership: Babysat 6 developers while translating "we need this yesterday" into realistic timelines.
Security Implementation: Added OAuth 2.0 so users can forget their passwords securely.
Vulnerability Testing: Hacked my own code before someone else did.
Payment Integration: Integrated Stripe/PayPal so the company could actually make money.
Performance Tuning: Optimized queries until the database stopped screaming.
Mobile Dev: Touched Angular Ionic once. Never again.

Junior Full Stack Software Developer (Professional Googler)

Dec 2020 – Dec 2022

Devex IT • Lahore, Pakistan

API Development: Built APIs. They returned 200 OK most of the time.
Frontend: Centered divs in Angular and Vue.js. It was harder than the backend work.
Performance: Used Redis because databases are slow.
Prototyping: Built MVPs that were supposed to be throwaway but are probably still in production.

THE TOOL GRAVEYARD

REST IN PIECES 🪦 (CLICK TO REMEMBER)

JAVASCRIPT FATIGUE

Node.js Express (Classic) Nest.js (Angular for Backend) Socket.io MikroORM Mongoose Passport PM2

PYTHON (SLOW BUT READABLE)

Python FastAPI Asyncio Aiohttp Pydantic Pytest Uvicorn SQLAlchemy

GOLANG (if err != nil)

Go Fiber Gin Chi GORM Bun ORM

FRONTEND CHAOS

React (Hooks Nightmare) Angular (Enterprise™) Vue.js Nuxt.js SvelteKit Ionic Tailwind CSS

WHERE DATA DIES

PostgreSQL SQLite MongoDB (Web Scale) Redis Elasticsearch DynamoDB

YAML ENGINEERING

Docker AWS CDK Terraform Ansible GitHub Actions ECS Linux

📢 FUNERAL SERVICE FOR DEPRECATED FRAMEWORKS

Keyboard Cat plays the final melody for codebases that have been rewritten in Go.

I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER!