Hello there!

I've been wanting to have a place to put my CTF writeups and other thoughts as well as things I've found interesting on my cybersecuriy journey, and I didn't really want to put them on someone else's site, so here we are. Now I guess I've got to actually put some things here, huh?

A little bit about me

I've been doing computer-y things for 40 years now, probably more if you count the fact that my elementary school in MN had a dial-up connection to the U to play the original ASCII-based Oregon Trail game as well as having on the PET-32 computers in the libraray. I've been fascinated ever since. I did my first graphics coding on an Apple IIe. In school, I technically studied Computer Science, but mostly what I got out of my degree was the knowledge that I didn't want to be a full-time coder. My job in school, however, was a different deal. I was lucky enough to work with the folks at Academic Computing, first in a help desk role for a couple of years, and then moving into contract network services (shoutout to my DSS peeps) where I learned the fundamentals that are still serving me well to this day. That's the first time I read a packet. It was cool. I was hooked. I still love reading packets today, and am thoroughly grateful that I don't have to do each one by hand anymore.

I have had a varied and interesting career doing everything from on-prem SRE work to making pictures in movies, teaching python to beginners to working with large enterprises in a customer engineering role at Heroku. Recently, I've come back to my first love, which it turns out is now called cybersecurity and is way more involved than the last time I did this sort of work. I've been studying up, and I got some certs to fill in the blanks (GSEC, GCIH) and am now looking for my first official infosec role. If you know someone who's hiring, I'm looking for a Detection and Response role. You can find me on LinkedIn.

I love CTFs and plan on adding writeups of interesting challenges here as I come across them and find the time to write them up. I hope you enjoy!