Thanks for taking the time to write about your reverse engineering experience. I'm more of a programmer than a reverse engineer, but I do like to dabble in RE and analysis and dealing with obfuscation and techniques like virtualization is always quite a challenge. There's probably a lot of learning material out there, but it feels difficult to digest at times, so articles like these are always helpful for getting some perspective on how these things work out in practice, and getting a feel for some of the approaches you can use when you run into a roadblock. Definitely makes me want to go mess around with some binary analysis after work.
Thanks for your comment. This article was written in one go, and it could be way better than the actual state. However I do appreciate that you mean to consider my article as a nice example on how things work out in practice. Being a programmer and knowing a little bit of reverse engineering is important (well, I'm still a programmer too!). If you have any questions, please let me know.
Regarding the difficulty of learning material, I can feel you. It was the same for me when I started (I have a lot of stuff to dig into!), and it's still. Academy papers might be difficult to understand, but once you comprehend the formalisms it'll be easier. For sure, understanding the formal formulas is another challenge that I haven't resolved yet.