Who Am I?

I am a student studying Cybersecurity at Grand Valley State University.

I am also employed as a Jr. IT Security Specialist at a software development firm and independent software vendor for wholesale greenhouses called The Picas Group.

At The Picas Group, I have gained experience in both supporting an in-house software and providing managed services, such as Web-Application Firewalls, IT, and Cloud Hosting with Microsoft Azure.

What Are My Security Passions?

One of my favorite concepts in Cybersecurity at this point in my education is encryption. I have always enjoyed math from the time I was a little kid until now, and I find the mathematical concepts used in modern encryption to be fascinating.

Another passion of mine in terms of security is web-application security. This was introduced to me when I began working at The Picas Group. Some of my favorite security related tasks that I have done at The Picas Group are implementing Web-Application Firewalls, securing admin pages to our applications, and implementing HTTPS certificates.

I also have enjoyed working with our SentinelOne tenant and Elastic's Cloud offering and familiarizing myself with their query languages, as well as implementing custom detection rules in both consoles.

What Are My Passions Outside Of Work?

Outside of work, you can find me watching sports, including football, hockey, wrestling, and occasionally baseball. I have always enjoyed sports, and I even used to officiate high school wrestling!

Aside from athletics I also enjoy programming, although I don't do much of it anymore. I recently built an app that allows users to encrypt files on their computer using PBKDF2 key derivation and ChaCha20 encryption. You can find the standalone executable on the GitHub repo linked in the projects tab of this website.