How I work
Verify, do not assume
A firewall rule tested only from the host it permits proves nothing about what it denies. An air gap read off a config file is a hope. A DHCP server logging a successful lease can still be handing out a broken one. Most of what I have learned on these projects came from checking the negative case, and one of the longest outages I caused was a blank field that every status indicator reported as healthy.
Prefer designs where the bad state cannot exist
Given a choice between a control you have to remember to apply and a structure that makes the unsafe option unavailable, I take the structure. Authentication as one global gate instead of a decorator on every route. An automation engine with no generic HTTP action at all, rather than an allowlist of permitted destinations. A bridge with no physical port instead of a firewall rule promising not to use it.
Write it down properly
Every project here has documentation written to be handed to someone else — a technical reference with schematics, guidebooks with exact commands, and a record of what broke and why. The reflection section of my capstone was singled out as its strongest part, which I took as confirmation that the writing is not overhead on the work. It is part of it.
Report failures accurately
There are several things on this site I got wrong: a miscounted line that damaged a live configuration file, an hour spent fighting a build pipeline when a finished artifact was already published elsewhere, a network fault I chased in the wrong subsystem for days. They are documented here in the same detail as the successes, because an engineer who only describes their wins is an engineer you cannot calibrate.
Background
Cybersecurity coursework at Wake Technical Community College. Final capstone — the Cerberus range, its documentation, and its presentation — scored 100/100, with perfect marks in every rubric category.
CyberOps Associate — security operations, monitoring, and incident response, completed May 2026 through the Cisco Networking Academy at Wake Tech (certificate). CCNA: Introduction to Networks — completed July 2025, same program (certificate). TryHackMe Introduction to Cyber Security (2024). These are Networking Academy course completions rather than proctored Cisco certifications — a distinction I would rather state than have you discover. Sitting the 200-201 exam is my next step.
Security operations and detection engineering, with a strong infrastructure foundation. I am equally comfortable on the offensive side, and I think the combination is the useful part — you write better detections for attacks you have actually run.
Proxmox VE, OPNsense, Cisco IOS, Windows Server and Active Directory, AD CS, Wazuh, Sysmon, Atomic Red Team, BloodHound, Metasploit, REMnux, INetSim, Docker, Linux administration, Python and Flask, WireGuard.
Foundations of Project Management (Google) and Change Management Foundations (PMI). Before security, six Wake Tech certificates in simulation and game development — fundamentals, production, modeling, QA, and business.
A SOC analyst, detection engineering, or infrastructure security role on a team that will let me keep building. Open to relocation and remote.
That last one is not filler. Six certificates in game development is where I learned that difficulty has to be designed, that a player who cannot tell whether they succeeded will quit, and that progression only works when the thing being taught is genuinely getting harder. The Gauntlet — a scored, ranked training campaign over a live range that pays you more for staying undetected — is that training pointed at security instead of entertainment.
About this site
It is hand-written static HTML and CSS with about forty lines of JavaScript, served from a content delivery network. No analytics, no cookies, no third-party scripts, no tracking of any kind. It ships a content security policy, strict transport security, frame and content-type protections, and a permissions policy denying camera, microphone, and location.
None of that is necessary for a portfolio. It is here because shipping a security site with a default configuration would say something, and I would rather it said this.
The full technical reference and guidebooks contain live credentials, host detail, and deliberately vulnerable configurations. They are not on this site and will not be. I am glad to walk through any of it directly, or provide sanitized excerpts on request.