Recovering SecOps Director with no delusions of ever becoming a CISO. Ex-Cisco, Digital Bond, Tenable, Mandiant, Gemalto & other Cybers. Army Brat. Pre-GWOT USAR MI NCO.
2025 Tech Learning in Review 2025 marked the first full year where I was IC again! For most of the year I was able to spend heads-down and hands-on without the distractions of meetings. If 2025 was the year of Kubernetes and Elasticsearch, let’s see where 2025 took me!
Where is Smedley Butler? We live another day in this Republic, not respirator bed-bound, texting for air, marked present on the roster, snatched from Home Depot to a foreign camp. Time is gauzy. We dream of Spring vaccine, not your daily Cetirizine placebo, recalling the year you took tree-line snapshots
It has been far too long time since my last book-blog at the end of November. It feels even longer--as if my last posts was from a different age. I have been putting it off. Not only have I done a poor job at finishing books that I started, but
A few months ago, I listened to a podcast with one of the founders of Marimo and I didn't immediately try it out. I assumed it was another SaaS platform where I'd have to sign up for. I was wrong. Very wrong. However, I did share
It has been over five years since I first used Vector, but only in the last several months have I started to take advantage of ClickHouse with S3 as I mentioned on LinkedIn last month. I also recently stood up a website with Ghost CMS for a non-profit and wanted
Over the summer, I went down the workflow rabbit hole (starting with what I knew like Apache Airflow and Dagster) but ended up deciding on Windmill.dev as the tool of choice. It was a compromise between pure code options vs. no code for orchestrating random scripts. What were the
There is only one more month left until 2025. I'm not sure what to think about that. But at least the election is over. America decided, even if I'm not thrilled by the result. We celebrated two birthdays in the family over the Thanksgiving break. None
I've been using the "free" version of Gemini included with my ChromeBook plus for a few months but recently decided to upgrade to Advanced and testing with documents in my Google Drive and within Google Docs. The advanced version also gives you better image generation capabilities.
At some point over the last few years I discovered DuckDB as an alternative lightweight SQL database that is super fast and has support for a wide variety of file formats, but until now I'd only used CSV and Parquet, but recently a pcap extension was released, so
(Five years ago I started the tradition of learning and blogging over the 4th of July weekend, so I figured I'd keep the tradition alive) Problem & Prior Art Even with autocompletion, the AWS CLI can be extremely verbose, so I often find myself writing short wrapper scripts
In February as I wound up my last role as a SecOps Director, the Engineer-Manager pendulum was definitely on my mind, but I wasn't sure which way I'd swing. Would I choose the IC route like I did in July 2019 or pick up another team?