I met Alexia at a security conference the day after I launched the podcast, and it only had 4 episodes then. She was the first person I met who I didn't know at all, who told me she listened to all episodes and wants more. As a podcaster, this is something you never forget.
So over the years I've ran into at other conferences and such, and sat down and talked with her a few times. Every time I'm thrilled to chat with her because of her knowledge and stories.
Get this, she's spent month (maybe years?) freighthopping. Where she would just jump on a random train with no idea where it was headed and ride the rails for adventure. Crazy right? Imagine the social engineering skills she picked up doing that.
But now here's what she's up to.
As a security engineer, Alexia hacks and defends Washington’s critical infrastructure applications and systems. With a background in agile dev, she has a fiery passion for iterative improvement, documentation, and transparency as foundations of secure, successful tech projects.
Alexia has contributed to several projects impacting Washington citizens. As a QA engineer, she developed custom CI/CD pipelines and delivered highly resilient and modern web apps to serve Washington’s small business owners.
At Washington’s largest human services agency, she collaborated with multiple technology units to plan and execute a SIEM and logging infrastructure deployment in addition to deploying and maintaining a network intrusion detection system.
Alexia is an Associate of ISC2, a Certified ScrumMaster, and working toward OSCP. She holds a bachelor of science in computer science and an associate of applied science in computer network administration.
Here’s a collection of resources she’s been compiling while studying for the OSCP! github.com/alexiasa/oscp-…
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If you're in IT, I highly encourage you to write a blog.
Here are 17 reasons why you should be blogging.
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1. Don't think of the blog as some new profound insight that makes you look smart. Instead, just write notes to yourself. If you make the blog useful to you, it'll be useful to others.
2. Throughout your career you'll stumble onto lots of great tips and advice and commands and tricks and ways to do thing. Blog all that. You will remember it better if you write it down. And it'll be easy for you to find it later.
20 lessons learned in my 10 years working as network security engineer. My job was to configure and manage firewalls for customers.
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1. Always have a backout plan. If you're going to be making changes to production equipment, expect it to go all wrong one day and you'll be ok if you have a plan for that. If not you'll be burned.
2. Sometimes your role is just a therapist. And people just need to be reassured or to be listened to when they need to get something off their chest. These are the easiest problems to fix because all you gotta do is listen.
You. Yes you. You are the target of a massive disinformation campaign.
Corrupt, evil powers of the world do bad and nasty things. And their tactic is to then flood the world with tons of fake news. They don't have a good way to spin it, so they drown the truth. /thread
These evil powers will try to delegitimize journalists who report the truth. Journalists will be attacked, arrested, sometimes killed.
Journalists and investigators are on the front lines of this information war. And they're our only hope for finding the truth.
Inoculate yourself from this by recognizing where disinformation comes from and don't trust those sources.
And try not to be so outraged, fear driven, or believe everything you read or see. This knocks you off balance and distracts you.
Those of you who believe in free will. I have some questions for you.
1. When you suddenly wake up at 2am and can't stop thinking about work and can't go back to bed for hours and hours because your brain won't shut off. Would you say you have free will during that time?
2. When you really don't want to do something but you know you have to do it so you do it, would you consider that to be free will?
For instance suppose you're a parent and you've got a sick kid vomiting in their bed, all night. Then they wake you up at 6am hungry and needy.
3.Suppose there's something you know you should do but just aren't doing it. Like getting out of bed on time, or doing exercise, or cleaning the toilet. You know you should and you want to, but you just aren't. So if you want to but aren't doing it, where's the free will in that?
Yesterday Spotify bought Megaphone for $235 million.
Megaphone is my podcast hosting provider, so here are my thoughts.
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Megaphone is unique in that it can do "dynamic ad insertion" (DAI). That is, I can swap ads in and out without having to mess with my original mp3 of the show. Just set a time mark of where an ad will go and it's stuck in. It's quite amazing technology.
Other Spotify acquisitions include:
Anchor (a podcast hosting provider) for $140 mil
Gimlet, a podcast network, for $200 mil
The Ringer, a podcast network, for $196 mil
It seems most shows on Gimlet and The Ringer host on Megaphone and use DAI.