Where this comes from

For eight years I worked as a Senior Teaching Assistant and Specialist Teacher, supporting SEND students in a school setting. It was demanding work, and it taught me things that don’t show up on a typical IT CV: how to manage a caseload under pressure, how to communicate the same idea to five different audiences in five different ways, how to stay calm when a situation escalates fast, and how to hold to a process (safeguarding, GDPR, documentation) even when it’s inconvenient.

A few years ago I started deliberately pivoting that experience toward IT and security. Not by going back to university, but by stacking certifications (CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and now CySA+), building a home lab, and taking on practical infrastructure work wherever I could get my hands on it — including a 200+ host network segmentation project at St Stephens Church, which is one of the first case studies I’ll be publishing here.

Why build this instead of just applying

I could have just kept updating a CV and sending it into the void. I chose to build this site instead for a few reasons:

It’s proof, not just a claim. Anyone can write “strong troubleshooting skills” on a CV. A public write-up of an actual server migration, complete with the mistakes I made and how I diagnosed them, is a different kind of evidence — it shows how I actually think under a real problem, not just that I know the vocabulary.

Documentation is the job, not separate from it. Security and IT work lives and dies by good documentation — incident reports, runbooks, change logs. Practicing that habit publicly, on my own projects, is direct practice for exactly what the job actually looks like day to day.

It forces me to actually finish things. A home lab experiment that never gets written up is easy to abandon quietly. Knowing I’m going to document it properly is a genuinely useful pressure to carry projects through to a real conclusion.

What to expect here

This site will hold two kinds of content going forward:

• Project write-ups — real infrastructure and security projects, including this site’s own migration off a LAMP stack, my home lab builds, and past network projects — problem, approach, what went wrong, and outcome.
• Blog posts — shorter, more reflective pieces on the journey itself: what I’m studying, what I’m finding difficult, what a particular certification actually involved in practice.

The aim is simple: build a body of visible, honest evidence of the pivot from classroom to console, for anyone considering me for a role — and for myself, as a record of how far the journey’s actually come.