Details, Pronto!
Impatient? Here's the bullet-point guide to Gary Arthur Douglas II, Security Geek:
Read on for more...
Specialties
Information Security, Security Engineering, Unix, Hacking, Networks, Code, Security Intelligence, Data Analytics and Visualization (Splunk!), Development, C/C++, Java/script, Python, Perl, Shell (most other languages too), Electronics, Microcontrollers, 3D Everything, Internal Entrepreneurship, Writing (technical, and persuasive), Creative Design. Teaching these things to others.
The Making of a Geek
I've been a professional geek for almost 20 years, self-taught on the earliest Personal Computers a long, long time ago.
From the Commodore 64 to the Apple II and everything else, as a teen I was obsessed with computing immediately. I learned assembly and BASIC, wrote programs overnight on paper (yes, paper) and tested them on my local Radio Shack's display-model TRS-80. In 1984 (at 16), I wrote my first production software: A parts-inventory system for CP/M, for a local stereo repair shop. For the uninitiated: Stereos were like huge iPods that only played Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, or Boston.
But when I graduated high school, jobs in computing were sparse. You'd find them in only two categories in the paper job board we called "Classifieds" - under "C" for "Computer Manufacturing" or "D" for "Data Entry." Well I wasn't going to do those, and it took years for the rest of the world to catch-up. I spent the intervening years quietly studying electronics and code, and wandering around L.A.
Some years later I spent time learning C and other languages, operating systems, and databases at a community college.
One day a friend there gave me a paper bag with 12 floppy disks: It was Slackware Linux 1.0, and it changed everything. Freed from the campus timeshare, I was root, right there at home - I could hack at Unix 24 hours a day! Associates from that time will say I was the first vocal Linux advocate they knew.
Jobs started to appear - I was an AS/400 operator for a tank engine maker, data entry proofreader, and various menial geek jobs. At night I co-sysop'd a BBS, and around this time exploratory phone phreaking became an obsession. Thus I came to know the "Hacker Mindset."
By the end of the 90s, the industry was buzzing: Regular people who didn't code, own a Klingon Dictionary or play D&D were discovering the Internet. Normal people with lives - and money to spend! This internet thing was going to be real...maybe?
It seems impossible now, but this was all really "iffy" at the time - for instance, one big debate under way was about what use images would possibly serve on the Internet. Yes, we were all still that naive.
By 1999 I had been a Systems and Network Analyst with Wells Fargo for several years, and got them to move me North to their headquarters in San Francisco. I wasn't in the Bay Area a year before I was offered a role in Internet Security, at Pilot Network Services - an innovative "managed security provider" for Fortune 500's.
It was there that I finally stepped into the thick of what would be my life: The ceaseless arms-race on a chessboard of ever-increasing complexity, against expanding throngs of digital marauders who are often as smart as me but have nothing to lose.
Challenge: Accepted.
I think that for many geeks, other matters eventually take priority in their lives: Family, creative pursuits, etc. But myself, I have yet to satisfy my obsession with computers: I am still up late, every night - coding, researching, studying, hacking. I continue to learn new programming languages and write code for new platforms, and experiment with new bleeding-edge tech.
There seems no sign this will ever change. I know for some, staying technical this long is a challenge or simply doesn't appeal. Others are just "born this way", and I would be still be doing these things (and was) even if there was no money in it at all.
As was aptly put by the great Montgomery Scott of the U.S.S. Enterprise 1701:
"I never wanted to be anything else but an Engineer." *
Coming Soon: Why Creativity Matters to Geeks
...especially security geeks. A bit of op-ed.
* From The Next Generation, Episode "Relics". Though I might replace "engineer" with "geek".