Issue Nº 1 · Chapter Six

Ideas

Things I want to make. Some are half-built, some are still a scribble. They are here because ideas kept in your head tend to stay there, and because the fastest way to find the people who care about the same things is to say them out loud.

Last updated

Things I want to build

The mentoring work, properly written down

Just a sketch

The biggest one. Right now everything I know about getting into security and getting good at it is scattered: one-to-one mentoring calls, blog posts, talks, the proof of work method, the labs, twenty-odd years of what actually worked and what wasted my time. Each piece helps one person at a time. I want to pull the whole body of work together into something substantial that stands on its own and reaches people I will never get to speak to.

I have deliberately not settled on the form yet. It could be a book, a proper structured programme, or a course you work through with the labs alongside it. What I do know is the shape: honest, no hype, evidence over certificates, and built so that someone with no budget and no contacts can still follow it.

> If you have been mentored by me, or want to be: which form would actually have helped you most?

Security awareness that escapes the industry

Started

Security awareness is something I care about a lot, and most of it is ignored because of how it is delivered. Annual click-through training does not change what anyone does on a Tuesday. The message is fine. The packaging is the problem.

The King of Cybersecurity is my first swing at it: real security hygiene smuggled inside dark-fantasy comedy, because people finish a story and do not finish a policy. It works well enough that I want to keep going and find more formats that reach the people who will never read a security blog: families, small businesses, everyone who is a target and has never been given anything worth reading.

> Looking for formats, illustrators, and anyone who has got awareness content in front of a non-technical audience and made it stick.

An open library of one-click labs

Started

Practising security usually means a home lab, a cloud bill, or a subscription. That filters out exactly the people who most need a way in. The nmap lab is the proof it does not have to: it runs in GitHub Codespaces, launches in one click from a browser, and costs nothing inside the free tier.

The idea is to keep going until there is an open library of them covering the skills people actually get hired on, each one free, each one finishable in an evening, and each one producing something honest you can write up afterwards. Labs and the proof-of-work method are the same idea from two ends.

> Which lab would you want next? Tell me and I will probably build it.

Why an ideas page?

C:\SHAK> TYPE README.IDEAS

An ideas page is the future tense of a personal site: an about page is where you have been, a now page is what you are doing, and this is the stuff you keep meaning to make. None of it is a business plan. If one of these is your itch too, or you have already built the thing and want to save me the trouble, say hello. Best route is LinkedIn.

C:\SHAK> DIR

C:\SHAK>