What I'm building this October: two anchor projects — the 31 Days Safer challenge and an open-source detection skill that maps alerts to MITRE ATT&CK — plus an "open workbench" where Hacktoberfest's weekly challenges are letting me explore what else I can build within the brand.

Hacktoberfest changed this year — no more counting pull requests, it's about building with open-source AI. So I'm writing an open-source skills.md that maps a security alert to the MITRE ATT&CK framework: the daily reasoning of a SOC analyst, packaged in public. Here's the plan, out loud so I finish it.

Tomorrow I sit the SC-900. This morning, I’m taking stock of where my head is — what feels different from my last certification attempt, what the practice numbers taught me, and the calm that comes from knowing I prepared honestly.

SC-900 on September 20 is my first online-proctored exam — and after a test-center anomaly ended my first CC attempt, I'm controlling every variable I can. Here's my OnVUE system-test walkthrough, the admission rules that actually matter, and the exam-day checklist I built from them.

I haven't been to a hacker con yet — so I built the shortlist. Where I'm trying to be, in what order, and why: local meetups now, BSides and WiCyS in the spring, and DEF CON by 2027.

Every cyber-career video says "it's the soft skills." Almost none of them show you what that actually looks like. So here's mine: I caught data-integrity failures in a vendor's returned results, took the finding to three different rooms, and watched them change their process. That's the one skill that quietly carries a data analyst into a SOC — and you already have more of it than you think.

When people hear I'm moving from data analytics into cybersecurity, they picture a hard reset. Then I started paying attention to what I'd already been doing — building sandboxes, hunting anomalies, testing before trusting. This is the story of the security instincts I had long before I had the language for them.