Getting Back On The Horse: Beginnings
A ex-keyboard cowboy looks to try and get back on the technical horse and back into what got him into I.T in the first place
I’ll keep this fairly short, this blog isn’t meant to be an autobiography - just somewhere to document all of the highlights and failures I encounter on the way to becoming a fully-rounded cybersecurity / DevSecOps professional.
Quick bit of background on me, if you don’t know me already: I actually started as a keyboard cowboy, cutting my teeth in the British military in remote tech support and as a Windows system administrator, via a less-than-fun few months as a service desk analyst.
After leaving the military, I continued down the Windows system administrator track for a little while, before pivoting to a position as a penetration tester with an information security firm. This is where my relationship with the keyboard started to drift apart a little.
Whilst at that firm, I found out that I was pretty good at consulting when I got pulled off the conveyor belt of back-to-back web application and external infrastructure tests to go onto a longer-term vulnerability management consultancy engagement with a large telecoms provider in the UK.
The issue here though is that the work heavily pulled on my interpersonal and communications skills, rather than my hard hands-on-keyboard technical skills, and before I knew it my skills had started to atrophy a little. Worse, the consulting engagement took up so much time and energy, I started to struggle with keeping them sharp.
As the years went on, I got better and better at consulting and even got into developing training and becoming an instructor. But it came at the cost of a lot of my “keyboard cowboy” skillbase.
Fast forward to now, where I’ve got a bunch of experience and a pretty solid resume behind me, but a nagging feeling that I’ve drifted too far from what initially brought me into the cybersecurity industry in the first place - the technical stuff!
No more, though!
I’ve elected to spend the next six months at a minimum consistently working through the DevOps Roadmap (https://roadmap.sh/devops , if you’re interested) and building real-world skills. Feel free to follow along with me, if you fancy it.
I’ll link everything I use and be totally honest about what I pay for and what I don’t in terms of access to services. It won’t all work, and it won’t be easy - but it wouldn’t be half as fun to try if it was.