I'm Taking the Plunge into the World of Cybersecurity.

Let's get the intro stuff out of the way.

Like any good blog, the recipe is at the bottom.

Who even am I?

Hey there, I'm Katheryn (or Kathy, I'm not super picky)!  I've just gotten my dream job, and I thought it might be fun to share my journey into the world of Cybersecurity. Not in retrospect, or by highlighting only my big wins, but by being open and honest about the experience. So let's start with a little background. 

I started my career in Customer Service. You name it, I’ve done it. Everything from serving enchiladas to building an online support team from the ground up. After twenty years, I decided to make the traditional “Millennial in their late 30s” career change. I packed up my wife and dogs for a cross-country adventure and attended the Coding Bootcamp at Georgia Tech. There, I spent a rather frustrating, but somehow also fun (?) six months creating things, starting with this simple wireframe using HTML and CSS:

So very grey and texty

And Building my way up to full-stack MERN applications built with a team:

I promise it's more impressive than it looks...
this was not a graphic design bootcamp, y'all. 

Over the course of the Bootcamp, I found myself loving the challenges of coding, especially the backend stuff, which does not lend itself well to screenshots. However, my passion for training came into play and even more than writing my own code, I loved helping my classmates thrive, and was also amazed at how much they helped me learn.  After graduating, I embraced my newfound passion, and rather than pursuing a coding gig, I leaned into education. I've worked as a tutor, a TA, and an Instructor for a Full-Stack Web Development program and loved every minute of it. 

Given my background, my new skillset, and my general love of both people and problem solving, Developer Relations stood out as the right field for me. I decided that I'd stick with education until just the right opportunity to come along to make my big break into Advocacy. It had to be the right company, with the right people and a product I could get behind. While I was on the hunt, I found myself suddenly in charge of a team of Cybersecurity educators and needing to quickly ramp up on the tools and concepts that our students were learning. 

As I was looking more into the world of cybersecurity, I stumbled across FleetDm and saw that they were looking for a Developer Advocate and were all about helping me not only grow that knowledge, but also do the work I've felt very strongly about doing.  Could things possibly line up more perfectly?!

So why are we here, exactly?

I have read so many articles about "How I got my start in this career" or "How I got where I am today" and they all have one thing in common: They focus on the wins. They highlight all of the really awesome stuff that happened. All of the right places and right times miraculously lining up and leading to the author being in a position where you had a reason to care how they got to where they are in life. 

While that stuff is all awesome, I'm a firm believer that it's the things we break along the way that makes us who we are. Every failure is a learning experience, every stumble an opportunity to change course when we eventually brush ourselves off and get back up. I want to hear about how someone mended fences along the way. How they once put their foot in their mouth so hard that it still haunts them randomly in the shower to this day. That time when they stared at their computer for three hours trying to find an error in the code only to cry when they realized that the comma on line 173 was, in fact, a period. 

To be totally fair, I don't think that anyone is trying to pretend that they didn't make those mistakes. It's just that, when put up against the entirety of an experience, they seem unimportant. When you're looking at the end result, it's easy to overlook all of the times you crammed for a meeting only to oversleep and show up 10 minutes late. 

On that note, I've decided to embrace the open-source mindset and share my journey from full-stack web developer to osquery master, security buff, and master of all things Fleet. I'm sure I'm going to stumble a lot along the way, and I'm sure I'll manage to break things in some spectacular way, so it should be an entertaining cautionary tale, at the very least! I'll freely admit that my excitement about this is heavily tempered by a concern that I've bitten off more than I can chew (imposter syndrome is alive and well). According to Seth Godin, that means I'm right where I should be.

If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.

—Seth Godin

    

Great, so what happens next?

Over the next couple of months, I'll be sharing my learning journey. Here are my main objectives for this phase of my development:

0. Gain a deeper understanding of the cybersecurity landscape

I've been on the outskirts of the cybersecurity world for a long time. My father is in the field, I've worked in tech, and I've managed a team of people who support cybersecurity students. At this point, I'd consider myself well-educated, but that's simply not good enough. I need to be an expert, and I need to get there fast. 

1. Get into the nitty-gritty of osquery

For those not in the know, osquery is an agent that allows you to collect data from registered devices using a universal query language. I'm really looking forward to having something in place that allows me to keep an eye on the health and security of my Mac, Windows, and Linux machines without having to recall the specific locations and commands on each machine. That is beyond cool. 

2. Tie all of that together with Fleet

What does Fleet add to osquery? Who's using it and why? Fleet offers an even more unified and simple way to manage all of your org's computer assets. Or your personal ones... Why the heck not, it's open-source! I'll need to really dig into not just the tech, but the people who use Fleet and the ones who are contributing to this awesome project. 

And the most important part... what I broke this week!

You know, I honestly thought that onboarding and research would be fairly easy to get through without breaking anything too terribly badly. I was wrong. I actually managed to break my OS installation. 

I don't want to make this post any wordier than it is already, but the long and short of it is that I ended up getting myself into a situation where my options were to either spend who knows how many hours chasing odd settings and compatibility issues, or just wipe things and start from scratch. In this case, I went with the "burn the house down to avoid tidying" option, and going forward, I want to be more mindful about making sure that I take the time to do things right when I run into issues rather than finding a bandaid to slap on it in the moment so that I don't end up having to make that decision again. 

Wow. You made it this far...

I'm flattered. Truly. I certainly hope that you'll hang out with me while I take this journey. If you're an industry professional, I'd love to hear any words of wisdom you'd like to share with me. If you're a hobbyist/home cybersecurity enthusiast and want to learn more with me along the way, let's have some fun and learn more together!

Cheers for now! 

Did you really think I was going to mention dogs and fail to pay the tax?