Many hats. One direction.
I've spent the better part of a decade leading digital transformation in education — building the platforms, policies, and people-programmes that make technology actually work in the real world. Along the way I picked up a lot of hats: classroom teacher, EdTech director, transformation lead, systems thinker and agile practitioner.
I've spent the last six months travelling central Europe. Before that I was a mediocre competitive powerlifter and a very inconsistent runner. Before that, Dota 2. Before that, home DIY projects. I have an innate obsession with the many different ways an egg can be cooked. As people, I think we can wear a lot of hats and these are just some of my favourite ones.
Why cybersecurity, and why now
I've turned down opportunities to go into the digital and cyber world before. Each time felt like the wrong moment and now it feels like the precipice is looming.
This blog really is just to serve my process of two things: journaling my studies and homelabs. Fundamentally, I started getting bored in the easily treadable path of tutorials - I got tired of watching and reading. I wanted to try and to document my learners. As much as I am working through Hack The Box Academy, TryHackMe, and having completed the Google Cybersecurity Certificate, I realised that I have fiddled and made small adjustments, but didn't build anything real in cyberspace.
Being an educator, I wanted to create documentation that showcased my learning and experiences. I need to try, succeed and fail forward to retain information and so I started putting my theoretical knowledge into action. Documenting labs has been interesting (you learn a lot about writing for clarity) but I wanted to start looking into what a homelab environment would look like if it emulated a corporate Blue Team environment. So I pulled my old laptop out and started. My first project — Tiramisu — is using Proxmox as the hypervisor, OPNsense as the firewall, Wazuh as the SIEM and n8n for automated response. For an extra layer of access, I use Tailscale for secure remote access. Like all proceeding projects, all aspects of it will be documented — every design choice, every mishap and every five-command fix that took four hours to find (looking at you wireless adaptors).
That project, more than any course, is how I understand what I am learning.
What I'm working on
Project Tiramisu — Blue Team Home Lab
Phase 1 is complete: Laptop 1 has hypervisor running, the network segmented and OPNsense is installed. Tailscale is active across all three devices and Laptop 2 is running Parrot OS Home Edition with full-disk LUKS encryption. Phase 2 is deploying the detection and response stack (Wazuh, n8n, Grafana) and building the first real detection workflows. Full series →
Certifications in progress
I have completed the Google Cybersecurity Certificate on Coursera and working towards completing the study material for CompTIA Security+ via Code Academy, TryHackMe's SEC1 and Hack The Box's Junior CyberSecurity Analyst pathway. These run in parallel with the lab because I just can't seem to do only one thing at a time.
AI Governance
My professional background is in investigating the technologies that work for people rather than the other way around. AI governance sits at the intersection of that background and where the field is going.
Why this site is built in raw HTML
This is the second iteration of my site. I learnt to build Adam Bytes in plain HTML and CSS because I like to learn from the tools that I use, not just read about them. This iteration has had some assistance from AI in terms of best practise and getting some of the style right.
I am not expecting everything to be always be polished and predict many commit edits and that's deliberate. The writing and the code improve together over time and the history of both is visible in the commit log.