Mid-Summer Update: Homelab, Projects, Certifications, and Some Lessons Learned
Since I decided to get this website up and forge ahead with a few projects, I knew that many roadblocks would arise and that each would be a learning experience. I’ll post updates to fully account for these, because I believe they offer valuable lessons to both newcomers and experienced tech folks alike.
The most valuable lesson I can share right now has to do with how we leverage AI when learning a new technology or executing a project: don’t take shortcuts, and don’t expect AI to make it effortless. Rely on the documentation instead - for Jekyll and GitHub Pages, it’s far more reliable than asking AI for guidance, and the same goes for setting up a SOC on a Raspberry Pi cluster. Lean on official documentation and user communities rather than asking AI to guide you end-to-end. AI is great for specific, easily verified tasks, but uncertainty compounds quickly once you ask for a lengthy set of directions - small hallucinations and minor inaccuracies add up and can derail a project if you’re not careful. Consult the people who built the thing you’re trying to use. I knew all this going in, which is the real shame: I wasted hours trying to shortcut my way through, telling myself it was fine since I had no one to answer to but myself. But I wanted quality and I wanted things to work. So, here we are.
Another update: I finally earned my PMP certification after agonizing over it for so long and likely over-preparing. My takeaway is that I’m both temperamentally and technically inclined toward the material and plan to apply it to management. I want to be dangerous when it comes to technical IT and cybersecurity skills but I also want to lean into developing people and managing projects. The PMP/PMBOK material gave me valuable insight into myself and the kind of career I want to build. That said, I still want to hone my technical skills. So, I plan to complete one more technical cybersecurity certification aligned with my SOC experiment: earning my CySA+. After that, I’ll turn my full attention to the CISSP in late 2025 or early 2026, with the goal of taking the exam around my 5th anniversary at CISA.
Once my SOC is running and I’ve documented a few trials here, I’m looking forward to building an AI chatbot - a proof of concept based on the writing of Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi mystic who came from India in the early 1900s to bring a liberalized brand of Sufism to the West. He was a prolific writer, and most of his work is public domain and written in English. I’m also interested in the writings of his children and students, but much of that is copyrighted, as are the English translations of the mystical writings that inspired Khan and the order he came from. So I’m doing some legal digging and getting consultation on that piece before I turn text into tokens and start training.
Aside from that, it’s been a hot and humid summer here in Buffalo. Just enjoying time with the wife and cat, doing CrossFit and cooking and entertaining! Further updates on these projects coming soon.