Writing
Field Notes
Observations from the intersection of IT operations, cybersecurity, and military service. Written for practitioners, not academics.
Hardening the HP 2530 Switch and Chasing a Routing Bug Over Tailscale
A used enterprise switch, a full hardening pass from factory defaults, and a routing bug on my own laptop that took longer to find than the switch config did.
Wazuh Goes Live: Building the SIEM and Chasing Down False Positives
The lab finally has a SIEM. Standing up Wazuh, wiring in two data sources, and three rounds of rule tuning against a Sonos speaker and a router that wouldn't stop...
Segmenting the Homelab: OPNsense and Remote Access With Tailscale
The Proxmox host was running, but every VM sat on the same flat network as my phone and everything else in the house. Here is how I fixed that with...
Building a Cybersecurity Homelab on the Cheap: Proxmox Foundation
Salvaging old mini PCs, fighting USB sticks and BIOS settings, and finally landing a working Proxmox host as the foundation for SOC analyst skill-building.
Refactoring my OSINT recon tool: from script to Python package
v0.3.0 of my OSINT recon tool shipped last night with no new features. Here's why that was the right call, and what refactoring a 1083-line script into a proper Python...
Upgrading my OSINT recon tool: RDAP, email auth, and what auditing my own domain taught me
Two weeks after the first version, I swapped WHOIS for RDAP, added a full email-authentication audit, and ran the tool against my own domain. Here is what I found, what...
The Grey Zone Is Not a Metaphor
We are already in an active conflict with peer and near-peer adversaries. It does not look like what the movies told us war looks like. Here is why that matters...
Building a Browser-Based Windows Log Analyzer
How and why I built a client-side log parser for Windows Event XML, IIS W3C logs, and plain text -- and what I learned about browser XML parsing along the...
Twenty Years in Vana'diel -- What FFXI Taught Me About the Long Game
I have been playing Final Fantasy XI Online on and off for twenty years. That is longer than some careers, longer than some marriages, and longer than the entire lifespan...
What 13 Years in the CAF Taught Me About Security Culture
I joined the Canadian Armed Forces as a Military Police Non-Commissioned Member (NCM) in my early twenties. I had no idea I was also starting a 13-year education in security...
Building an OSINT domain recon tool from scratch
How I built a Python-based domain reconnaissance tool as my first real coding project, what I learned along the way, and why it matters for practical security work.