2015 in review

2015 has been quite the year for me! For one, I started blogging about information security and software development. I added a category for hardware, but I haven’t been able to dive very deep into those projects (yet). This blog post will be a review of all of the content I’ve blogged about, hopefully it’ll be a good collection of how much I’ve grown. To prove I really am what my tag line says; that I’m better than I was a year ago.

The Start of 2015

Last January, I started this blog for a class. I was required to write weekly posts about a interesting topic. This blog started out on tumblr and I’m not to proud of some of the early posts. Forget the fact that I new nothing about SEO when writing a blog post, the content was not what you’d expect from your run of the mill InfoSec blog. My blog would’ve suffered if it wasn’t for Lesley Carhart, thanks to some conversations on twitter, she pointed me in the right direction and gave me some awesome ideas for better topics for future posts. I learned about Shmoocon for the first time and the Kill Chain. This was the starting point to my blogging days

Borrowing from Hacking Exposed

After I struggled to find new content for each week. I started to use my blog posts as a “spark notes” for what I’ve learned from reading Hacking Exposed. For each chapter or section I read, I’d write a blog post about what I learned. Honestly, I didn’t do the book justice, I still haven’t read the book all the way through and the note book style posts gave way when the class ended and I was no longer required to write a post every week for a grade.

It was right around the end of the semester that this blog was transferred from Tumblr. It became a wordpress site for a final project in a different class that semester. I got brownie points with my professor for hosting a blog and being able to maintain it along with my homepage and a side project called COGSS (yes that’s still under development…)

Expanding content

As the blog posts were exhausting my security knowledge, I was running out of ideas, and weekly pots became harder and harder. This was when I opened the site to other topics: hardware and projects. This was my escape goat to get in a few long posts about websites I’ve built and wanted to show off, or programs that I’ve found that helped to make the blog better. Over the summer, I worked a full time internship and I didn’t spend my nights writing blog posts. I went from once a week to once a month, but I feel like the content was improving.

Bringing back the InfoSec

I didn’t really start having strong hacking posts until I went to A2Y.ASM, a one-day mini-conference in Ypsilanti. I learned a lot that day and had a lot of new content to regurgitate into a blog post. Right around this time I was able to find Misec, GrrCon and a infosec mentor. It was the kick start I was looking for to get into the security community. Over the last few months I was able to have a nice mix of Infosec and Development posts where I could write down what I was learning as a hacker and I could rave about what I was doing as a developer.

The best of 2015

If I had to boil the best down to a paragraph. I’d have to say finding a infosec community, going to conventions, and giving my first talk was the highlights of my year. Without Twitter, Misec, or my mentor, I’d be doing everything from books and that’s not really how I learn, I’m more hands on then that. Volunteering at GrrCon was amazing, I learned a lot and met some awesome people. It’s something I’ll never forget. Mid-December, I gave a web hacking presentation to Spartan Hackers. It wasn’t bad for my first talk but I have a lot to learn about presenting. It’s good to know though that I can teach as I learn.

What’s next in 2016?

My goal for 2016 is to get back to weekly blog posts. I’d like to be able to do 2 infosec posts, and 1 dev project and hardware build each month. But we’ll see how that goes. I’d like to go to two conventions in 2016, GrrCon and ______. I went to two CTFs in 2015, so it’d be cool if I could go to 4 in 2016 or maybe help set one up. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! I also have a pile of hacking books stacking up, it’d be nice if I could read a book a month and be able to share some of what I’ve learned. My biggest goal though, since I’m graduating from college in May, is to get a full time job as a information security professional and absorb as much of the career, community, etc as I can because I really enjoy every second of it.