I finally got on hackthebox.eu after wanting to go for it for a while. Over the holiday break I leaned in and was able to successfully own 13 machines in 17 days, and achieve the rank of "Pro Hacker". I learned a lot about attacking and defense over the last couple of weeks, and the lessons learned have already paid dividends when I returned to work (at my job that is not InfoSec).I didn't really know the rules, so I started just going for it. After a couple of active machines were under my belt (meaning there are no walkthroughs), I decided to do a retired machine (walkthroughs and videos galore). This is while this was fun, you don't get points for retired machines, so I decided to just focus on active machines and see how far I could climb the ranks. Over the last couple weeks I had a great time, met and exceeded my original goal, and learned a ton in the process.The community is very active, and I quickly found lots of users to talk with about pentesting and I got a lot out of helping other users in addition to doing the labs myself. I haven't been engaged in InfoSec for very long, so it was really great to talk through problems (and alternative tools and solutions) with other players on HTB.Because the rules prohibit write ups of the invite process or active machines, I can't disclose much more than that right now. I plan to post write ups as the machines rotate and get retired, but for now I wanted to post and encourage people to check out this amazing resource!