My name is Brian Petty. I’m a former hotel manager that has always had an intense interest in technology. I was (in the 1990s) in college for Computer Science/Computer Engineering at Mississippi State (It was a double major, but only 3 classes different at the time, so no big deal to get both) and then I discovered something: I like playing with hardware. I do like development, but probably not as the only thing that I do. And I like people more than most engineers do. Then after some financial difficulties, I dropped out, moved home, and went to work. That said, after almost two decades in the Hospitality industry, I discovered that I don’t like people all that much, and so I started learning what I had originally wanted to do, but which there wasn’t a degree (at MSU) for at the time: cybersecurity.
While pivoting from Hospitality, I wanted to do something, almost anything else while working on cybersecurity. You know that phrase “be careful what you wish for?” Yeah, so I ended up working for Navient, the student loan processor. A large part of my time there was great, but other times I was on teams that were basically doing collections calls. Turns out, I like people even less when they’re yelling at me. The best part about working there, though, was that I found out about the American Public University System. They’re an online university (though they do have a campus in West Virginia), and is made up of American Public University (APU) and American Military University (AMU). Nice thing about them is that they have an enormous book grant: undergrad students never have to pay for books. Since I was working at Navient, I got a small discount on tuition, and so I enrolled. I graduated officially in June of 2020 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Information Systems Security, with a concentration in Cybersecurity. That sounds strange to most people because it’s like getting a concentration in what your degree is already in. There were actually two programs for security at that time, Cybersecurity and Information Systems Security. Cybersecurity was mostly software and code-based, while Information Systems Security was mostly hardware and policy based. Still, there was a great deal of overlap between the two programs. The concentration basically let me take all of the fun higher-level (300 and 400 level) classes from the Cybersecurity degree, while still learning things like network forensics (rather than just computer forensics, though we got to take that too) and biometrics. Loved it.
Since then, I’ve kept learning, and have a Security+ from CompTIA, and my AWS Cloud Practitioner, AWS Developer Associate, and AWS Solutions Architect Associate certifications. I’m currently looking to get into the industry in any way possible. I do have a few years of help desk experience, including some Tier 2 work.
This site (well, blog) is primarily dedicated to the 100DaysOfHomelab challenge, which is what inspired its creation. I would be very surprised if I don’t eventually start posting other content about networking and security, as its something that I really enjoy learning about.
Things are slow right now with the #100DaysOfHomeLab, because I started a new position as a (very junior) IAM Engineer a little over a month ago. That’s taking most of my time and energy right now. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to it pretty soon, though!
** *Contact Links:
Email: [email protected] GitHub: BPetty-InfoSec Twitter: MatrixWyrm Mastodon: MatrixWyrm