~/blog/life/leaving-medium
$cat index.mdx|
cd blog/life2026-07-051 min read

Leaving Medium: Why I'm Writing Here Now

Every article I published on Medium built Medium's domain, not mine. From today, everything I write lives here — security research, engineering notes, philosophy, all of it.

For the last few years, everything I wrote went to Medium. Security research, CVE breakdowns, essays on psychology and money — all of it built an audience, and all of it built Medium's domain authority instead of mine.

That ends today.

Why move

Three reasons, in order of importance:

  1. Ownership. My words, my domain, my ranking. When someone searches for the topics I write about, I want arafatops.com in the results — not a medium.com URL that happens to have my name on it.
  2. No paywall roulette. Medium decides who reads what and when. Here, everything is open, always.
  3. One home. My research, projects, CVEs, and writing now live in the same place, cross-linked, in the same terminal-green theme you're looking at now.

What to expect

I'm committing to writing daily. Not every post will be a 3000-word teardown — that's the point. Two kinds of writing live here:

  • Essays — long-form, researched, polished. Supply chain attacks, IDOR hunting, how dopamine actually works.
  • Notes — short daily thoughts. Raw, quick, honest. Philosophy, observations, things I learned today.
$ cd blog/
$ ls
security/  engineering/  business/  psychology/  life/
$ echo "see you tomorrow"

The old Medium articles stay where they are — links to them live in the archive below the blog index. Everything new starts here.