I Messed Up

Hey all, so much for a post every month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. No seriously, August was a little rough for me so I did slack. I spent a lot of time applying to jobs this month. The daily barrage of rejection emails and subsequent daily applications had really put me into a funk. I stopped keeping track a little after graduating, but I easily submitted at least 10 a week minimum, most weeks felt like I did at least 30. Since June I think I am in the high 300 applications range. Any who, the good-news is I am walking into September with a few prospects, to you know, make a living.

What I Have Been Working On

NMAP parser

  • This project currently is about 75% done. I was showing some of the functionality to colleagues and got some feedback. This meant that I had to roll back some of the progress made, but it will make the code not only more professional, but also easier to write at later stages. Specifically a change from parsing TXT to parsing XML output from NMAP. I spent a lot of time creating regular expression checks for the TXT output, which would be redundant with parsing XML/JSON depending on how I handle it. However, I have not worked on this methodology yet.

Splunk Certification

  • A friend informed me about a certification that Splunk was offering as a beta test. Particularly the Splunk Certified Cybersecurity Defense Analyst certification. I am about 70% of the way done, and after I finish the eLearnings, and companion tests I am going to complete the “Boss of the SOC” to hopefully further reinforce the information. I will publish any feedback/results in a future post.

Finishing a Few Books

  • I just finished Ask Iwata (highly recommend btw) and I’m thinking about writing a short review as a post this month. In a sentence, the book really flushed out, for me, the creative environment/workspace that I want to participate in. Any future post on it will highlight a few particular takeaways.

  • Kinda off topic, before I graduated with my undergrad this June I had a daily routine. In the morning I would read the daily material for my various classes, during lunch read Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership, and after classes when waiting for my family to finish for the day I would read Ask Iwata. Honestly I think these texts help shape this transitional time period in my life as well point me closer to who I want to be in the future. I was thinking about who I was two and even five years ago, and honestly I feel like a different person at each stage. But of course there is still room for improvement ✌️.