My name is Stefan. I founded Ceos3c in 2016 to teach cybersecurity, Linux, and web development through hands-on tutorials — complicated stuff, made easy. A decade later, that mission hasn’t changed, but the site has been through a real arc.
The honest story
Peak (2019): Ceos3c reached roughly 78,000 visits per month. Tutorials on Kali Linux, WSL2, and ethical hacking ranked well and the site generated meaningful income.
Decline (2023–2025): Google’s helpful-content updates, AI answers cannibalizing informational queries, and a failed scaled AI content experiment all hit at once. Traffic fell from ~50,000 to under 2,000 visits per month. The rankings didn’t break because the pages were bad — the traffic tap upstream was turned off.
Rebuild (2026): I’m reviving Ceos3c with a different model: fewer posts, more depth, real expertise, and full transparency about who writes what. No fake author personas. No mass-produced AI filler. Just hands-on guides from someone who actually does the work.
What I do today
I create educational content on YouTube and on this blog. Topics include ethical hacking, Linux, web development, programming, and open source. I also build and ship real products:
- ProofSwap — social proof for SaaS landing pages
- XPMetric — metrics and analytics tooling
- EasyEarningsTracker — income tracking for creators and freelancers
Background
Hacker. Fascinated by security since watching movies like Hackers as a kid — though I didn’t learn real hacking until my late twenties. No exciting black-hat story here; I’ve always been one of the good guys. Being a hacker, to me, means being curious and always eager to learn.
Self-taught developer. I started programming in my early thirties with no bootcamp and no CS degree. I use that knowledge to teach others and to build the products above.
I quit a well-paying CTO role in December 2020 to pursue content creation full-time. That bet didn’t play out the way I hoped — but the skills, the audience, and the domain authority are real assets I’m putting to work in this rebuild.
How this site works now
Every article on Ceos3c is written or reviewed by me. On roundup and review pages, I disclose how I test — whether that’s reading every book cover-to-cover or testing WiFi adapters on my own Kali setups. If I haven’t used it, I don’t recommend it.