About

I started in IT doing desktop support — the kind where you crawl under desks and reset passwords. Twenty years later, I'm leading Zero Trust implementation for FEMA's Security Operations Center as a GS-14. The path between those two points taught me that cybersecurity is built by people who actually do the work, not the ones writing whitepapers about it.

Most of my career has been at FEMA and DHS. I earned my stripes in the trenches: incident response, threat intelligence, building automation for SOC operations. When Zero Trust became the federal mandate, I was the one figuring out how to actually implement it across FEMA regions — not theoretically, but in production environments where downtime means lives at risk during disasters. I've deployed as a Cyber Advisor during major disaster responses. I hold CISSP, CCSP, and CEH certifications, but the real education came from breaking things and fixing them at 2am.

Outside of work, I run a home lab that would make most enterprise admins jealous: Sophos firewall, Portainer for container orchestration, Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels, Home Assistant automation. It's where I test ideas before I recommend them. If I can't make it work in my lab, I'm not putting it in production.

Now I'm fascinated by AI — not the hype, but the tooling. I'm building automation, running experiments, and documenting what actually works at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI. I haven't deployed AI systems at FEMA or DHS; this is personal exploration on my own time. But I believe the next wave of security operations will be powered by practitioners who understand both domains deeply enough to build tools that don't just demo well, but survive contact with reality.

This site is where I share what I'm learning. Practitioner voice, not thought leadership. What I've built, what broke, and what's worth your time to explore.