Quick Introduction

As you could guess from the website title, I have skills and knowledge in a variety of topics but only a small core of competencies I am confident in. This is in large part due to my belief that a wide breadth of knowledge is key to making wise decisions, no matter the problem. A book called “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein puts this into words much better than I could.

When I was younger, I was the opposite. Once I became competent in one area, I sought to excel in it, especially if I seemed to be better at it than others. However, I realize now that there is a remarkable amount of overlap between topics and opportunity for innovation based on methodologies and frameworks that can be adapted and reused. You don’t have to be the smartest person at something to make worthwhile contributions and innovations in that area.

Background

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and have coded extensively in Python for most of my career. I have experience with C, Scala, and JavaScript, but I gravitate to Python for its general applicability and larger community (tying back to my belief).

Since school, I’ve learned much more through professional courses, training, and hands-on experience. As Mark Twain said something along the lines of “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” I won’t go through everything here, but the major things I’ve taken away from my early career are:

  • If there are smart people in the room with you, listen; if you are the smartest person in the room, share your knowledge. Train and be trained, improve the organization
  • Bashing your head into the keyboard to figure something out is admirable, but you deserve to bash your head again if you don’t consolidate your knowledge in a usable format so that you or others don’t make the same mistake. Develop a resilient knowledge management process
  • People are more easily inspired and persuaded when the message is simple. Workflows are easier to execute or modify if they are simple. Communication happens faster with less errors when emails are simple. Make it simple

Experience

I spend about half of my professional time in operations getting things done (“The buck stops here” type) and the other half working on research and projects that I believe will improve the organization’s efficiency. This has involved a healthy mix of incident response management, cyber threat intelligence, penetration testing, military and logistics planning, data science/engineering, and machine learning.

Hobbies and My Free Time

I was not very athletic and well-coordinated growing up. I half-jokingly blame this on my astigmatism. I’m trying to make up for lost time by being more active and trying to earn back hand-eye coordination. A book called “Outlive” by Peter Attia has also inspired me to take my health and longevity very seriously. It is one of the most influential books I have read.

I play old people sports like tennis and golf, although I took a long break from sports after I ruptured my achilles tendon playing tennis. In the meantime, I’ve been regularly working on my upper body strength with dumbbells and my base cardiovascular endurance with incline walking on a treadmill.

At my desk, I frequently work on my homelab on the weekends to try new services to self-host. One of my proudest projects include a public-facing Apache Guacamole server that I can access from anywhere with an internet connection and a browser without additional requirements or software. This Guacamole server was also setup with a reverse proxy that automatically manages TLS certificates for ensuring traffic is HTTPS, which is a must for publicly-accessible services. I also turned on multi-factor authentication, which turned out to be a simple line in the yaml configuration file. You can see more here.

Another recent example is this website! I have worked with static site generators like mkdocs before but Jekyll had a bit more of a learning curve. I was able to figure out how the templating works after some troubleshooting and now I have a website!