Three years of writing on the internet
A third year of writing on the internet, penning 32 posts for a total of 110 posts. The best part of trying to set a course for the next year is seeing how far I am from both the starting point and where I thought I’d be. 🥂
Growth expectations and growth realities
✍🏼 I moved from writing about git and other development-centered topics to getting silly deep into container security well beyond what I do in my day job. This mostly mirrored the change in conversations I was having day to day. Most topics here are “sourced” from a customer-facing career.
🎙️ I was honored to have several amazing conference proposals accepted … but they were all within 2 months of each other. I may have slacked off a bit after getting those all across the line. 😅
- Container Escapes 101 is now completely online. I presented at the AppSec Village at for my first DEF CON … honestly still can’t believe it.
- Signing and Verifying Multi-Architecture Containers with Sigstore worked through a common problem folks struggle with when mirroring containers in an enterprise at OpenSSF Community Day NA 2025 .
- Following the Golden Image Road: Best Practices and Pitfalls was my first (and so far only) sponsored conference talk at Open Source Summit NA 2025 . It was the same stories I tell without the sales context, yet “more sales-y” than my tone at any open conference talk.
- A Gentle Introduction to Container Security wrapped up tons of FAQs I’ve gathered over the years, organizing it into a straightforward way to get your head wrapped around container security for BSides Boulder 2025 . I put together diagrams as a “map of problems” to show where a security threat exists in the container tech stack from when I started learning.
🚀 That shiny new job from last year grew the team from 2 folks supporting public sector to nearly 50 in just a year. It’s still shiny and new because what I do changes every month at this pace of growth, which is exhilerating and scary and energizing and exhausting all at the same time. There’s no way to prepare for that kind of growth. I’ve learned so very much and hope to write about it soon. ✨
Tradeoffs rule everything
🧭 I didn’t learn what I’d set out to at the start of the year. Instead, I had the opportunity to learn a lot of other things instead. These things are still valuable. Figuring out pace to avoid burnout meant that I didn’t write as much. While the pace of 2-3 posts per month worked out on average, it wasn’t what happened. I’d taken most of the spring and summer away from writing to focus on conference talks. Once those were done, that same content became posts in quick succession afterwards.
⌛️ No agenda, no attenda. Putting real life first meant being deliberate about the things on the calendar. There was a shocking number of standing meetings with no agenda, no notes, and a hodge-podge of attendees that are probably related to initiative. Without clear direction, these took up time without any returns. Simply asking “why am I here?” helped narrow that some. Explicitly asking for an agenda whittled it down even more.
📚 Someone can always bend space time better. There’s always someone who knows more - but there is also someone who knows less. We are all both of these all the time about some topic. It’s a relief to be at peace with that, and instead only try to share the knowledge you have and learn from others doing the same. ☺️
🎭 Taking some control back from imposter syndrome. It never goes away. Asking openly about those terrifying negative consequences helped show how silly these are. After confiding in a friend, they asked “What’s going to happen? They think you don’t belong here?” That’s already true and nothing I ever do right, wrong, or otherwise would affect those folks. Why bother myself over folks, real or imaginary, that I wouldn’t ever belong with anyways? 🤷🏻♀️
What’s next?
The promise of future wisdom is exciting. The world will be a new place by then too. Next up:
- Do cool stuff
- Tell people about it