May Gray, 2024

Out here, May is known for being gray. A month or so of overcast skies and a pretty gloomy feeling in general.

Life has been interesting as of late. Perhaps "interesting" isn't even the right word for it. Frankly, it's been tough. This year, the games industry has been wrought with continued layoffs after a brutal year last year. It seems like every other day I'm reading news from some colleague who was impacted by layoffs or studio closures. My own place of work was impacted by layoffs that affected roughly 35% of our team members. I am incredibly grateful that I was not impacted personally, but what I can only describe as survivor's guilt has been weighing heavily on me. Even post-layoffs at my own company, we have been hemorrhaging talent left and right as folks move onto their next adventures, which has been taking its own toll on morale and motivation to make it through the day.

Because of these hits to my mental health, I unfortunately wasn't able to really focus and finish my reading list for Q1. It wasn't until this past weekend, with the San Diego Book Crawl that I managed to pick up a book and engross myself in it. This book was "Legends & Lattes" by Travis Baldree, whom I came to realize was the developer of a game I spent far too much time playing growing up (FATE, which came bundled with my first personal laptop). It has been such a delightful read and I eagerly look forward to finishing up this first book and moving onto its sequel.

I have managed to find the time and motivation to work through several courses by TCM Security as I work towards earning some of their certs. While most of the material is nothing new to me, it has been a great refresher after having been out of the infosec space for so long as a primary focus. Andrew Bellini's "Beginner's Guide to IoT and Hardware Hacking" was incredibly well put together and as it turns out, Andrew has accepted a full time position at TCM Security, where he is currently working on designing their IoT Tester certification. Looking forward to adding that to my roster of certifications that I intend to earn this year. I also attended BSides San Diego, which was a great time and I look forward to volunteering next year.

All of the negativity aside, I have really enjoyed getting back into centering my focus and energy around infosec and think I have been making some great strides towards making that lateral career shift that I've been telling myself that I want need to make. To add to the good things, a long time friend of mine, whom I have mentored for the greater part of a decade has landed a job as a malware reverse engineer at Bank of America. I am incredibly proud of him and how far he has come since we met on YouTube all those many years ago.

Perhaps May won't be so gray after all.

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