Restarting, Again
Just a brief hello, some background on why I have a personal site, and what I hope to do with it. Not the first 'hello world' blog post I've written, but maybe the last?
I’ve had a personal domain for a very long time, and have made several attempts to put up a simple but interesting-enough website. I’ve spent a lot of time searching for templates and designs that I liked, eventually selecting one that’s fine, but still disappointing in one way or another. Although I’ve done simple web design in the past, I never felt my HTML and CSS skills were good enough to create a fresh new design myself.
Finally, in 2026, I think it’s possible Claude Code has finally broken me out of that meh-fueled loop. I now have access to an AI designer that knows CSS and is willing to refine and tweak every little thing that bugs me.
# Why?
I think this is true for many people, but in a varied and technical space like cybersecurity, creating a personal presence is a way to put yourself out there and build connections. There is unlimited potential for people in my field to specialize, share knowledge, impart wisdom, and contribute to our collective growth in a positive and meaningful way. It doesn’t matter if you’re into red teaming, identity and access, Zero Trust networks, risk management, threat intelligence, digital forensics… the list goes on – there are new developments and evolutions happening all the time. Having a place to share my thoughts and learnings is, I hope, a good thing.
# Building a “brand”
Having a personal website is also supposed to be good for building a personal “brand”. I think I’m too much of a Xennial to care about this, to be honest, which may be to my professional detriment. But I also see the value in carving out a small corner of the internet for this purpose, and have peers that are starting to do the same. Maybe with enough time and a large enough body of work posted here, I’ll even come to enjoy it.
# What’s next
This post gets the “hello world” out of the way for the new site. Next, I want to put together a post that steps through the process of creating a site and owning it from top to bottom. I see too many people creating new content on sites like Medium that they don’t control, and I don’t like it. It’s not hard but also not obvious how to do this, so I’m going to explain the how.
In the meantime, take a quick look at ./about for a bit more about me and my professional background. There are links to my social media accounts in case you’d like to contact me.