About
Who am I?
Howdy! I’m Chuck, or as a former HR head called me, Chvxt3r. The name kinda stuck so I decided to go with it.
So I’ve been in IT since the mid 90’s. I know, some of you probably weren’t even born yet, but yes I remember the days of tape drives, floppy disks, dial-up internet, and waiting 4 hours for an ascii picture to download, and when computer security consisted of installing Norton anti-virus and praying. After being told by multiple employers I’ve pretty much capped out at being a generalist, I decided to specialize and chose cybersecurity.
I created this site as just a small side-project to upload write-ups and maybe share my thoughts occasionally from my attempt to narrow down my general knowledge into a specialty, albeit kinda late in the game.
So we’ve established I’m old as dirt, but what’s my real experience?
So, after being the resident computer nerd in high school, I consulted with several local small businesses on computer repairs, network upgrades, software installs, server upgrades, the normal level 1 or 2 help desk stuff that they didn’t want to hire for. Eventually, I decided to get some formal education, and went to a local tech college majoring in Information and Network Technology. After breezing through that, I moved on to formally work for a local MSP. I stayed with MSP’s for pretty much my entire career, they seemed to offer a variety that you couldn’t find working as an inhouse tech. Besides, I’d seen enough inhouse tech’s that had really let their skills go to realize I didn’t want that for myself.
Working at MSP’s gave a good variety. Everything from advanced networking and systems deployments to migrations to consulting gigs advising an inhouse department the best way to deploy a new technology and troubleshooting technologies that the inhouse team wasn’t qualified or advanced enough to tackle. Eventually I worked my way up to being “the” senior level guy, and the one that everyone turned to when they couldn’t figure something out. I love solving problems and usually if the problems got to me, they were pretty complex. Unfortunately, a few of my employers told me I had capped out, and that without specializing or moving in to management, I was probably never going to advance. Since I don’t like management, it looked like it was time to specialize. This brings us to now.
So where are we trying to get to now?
So, that all brings us to now… I chose security because security has it’s hand in everything. Also, given that most business already have a pretty mature infrastructure, building security in from the beginning isn’t really an option. This is going to lead to problems, and problems need to be found and solved. I also might have dabbled with “hacking” in my high school days and almost got in a lot of trouble, so it seemed like I was coming full circle.
The idea is to knock out a couple of certifications, at least enough to get my foot in the door, and then hopefully I’ll experience the same level of career growth that I’m used to seeing in my career.
This hasn’t been without difficulties, however. I’ve noticed that a lot of the tech that I actively avoided would have been nice to know for security. For example, web development. I know HTML, but if anyone asked me to design or fix a website, I would tell them they really should hire a dev for that, and it’s outside my wheelhouse. Same with coding. I knew a little, but I’m finding I have a lot of catching up in a few areas that are (at least to me) kind of baseline knowledge to do things I’d like to do.