My name is Ayden, and I am a 25 year old Pacific NorthWest native. I love to run and hike the local trails like Timberline Trail which loops all the way around Mt. Hood. I also enjoy scifi shows and I’ve recently been getting into cooking. My professional background is in healthcare and mental health. I majored with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology at Oklahoma Christian University, and I’ve worked at places like Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, Amen Clinic, and Compass Oncology.
I’ve recently started a career switch from healthcare to cybersecurity. I felt like I had plateaued and work wasn’t making me grow. I remembered back in high school when I took a free online course called “Learn Python the Hard Way” by Zed Shaw. The constant challenges and new lessons kept me captivated for months. So I figured I would revisit the world of the internet of things, and take a free course from Cisco called “Introduction to Cybersecurity.”
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I got a concussion on one of my adventures on Mt. Hood and the doctor said to take a week off work. During that time, I found that even though I could barely focus for a few minutes at a time and I wasn’t really supposed to look at screens, I kept returning to the “Introduction to Cybersecurity” course, and I quickly finished it. It opened up a new, scifi-esque world of threats, risks, and vulnerabilities in a swiftly evolving cyber landscape.
Cybersecurity was a way to engage with the world in a new and exciting way!
Inspired, I went on Coursera and signed up for the Google Cybersecurity Certificate. In less than a month, I had earned my certificate and significantly increased my knowledge base.
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On another trip back from Cloud Cap on Mt. Hood, I was listening to Episode 22 of “The I.T. Career Podcast” with Christophe Limpalair, and he recommended making a blog to document what you’re learning. Limpalair listed two benefits of starting a blog. One is that by teaching others, you actually learn better yourself. Second is that you can preserve a record of your expanding knowledge base for future employers.
With that in mind, I asked an AI assistant, Grok, what the most secure way to build a website was and how to turn it into a learning lab. I will get more into the recipe Grok provided and my own modifications in a future blog post. It was quite a steep learning curve, but here we are!
Turning to the future, I have just bought vouchers for the CompTIA Security+ and CompTIA Network+ and I am stoked prepare for those. I will be documenting my progress here, as well as any other interesting cybersecurity lessons I learn along the way.
Thank you for joining me on this journey!
