~/connstruct$cat about.md
About
I'm Connor. More than twenty years in and around information security — but the honest version is simpler than any job title: I'd rather pull a thing apart and understand exactly how it fails than just use it.
How I got here
It started on a Commodore 64 my mom bought me. I was eight, and BASIC came first — but I kept wanting to know what was underneath it. That led me to a dusty book in the back of the local library that taught the MOS 6510 instruction set, then to one on assembly; I connected the dots and wrote what amounted to a crude 6510 assembler — in BASIC — so I'd stop hand-jamming hex just to get anything done. Even then, I'd rather build a tool than keep doing the boring part by hand, and I couldn't leave the layer underneath alone. I never grew out of it.
My Linux story starts with Red Hat Linux 7 — the actual RHL, not RHEL 7 — and runs through Fedora Core 1 and Slackware, back when a usable GNOME desktop meant Dropline and hours of compiling on a 500 MHz Coppermine Pentium III, quietly hoping the build wouldn't fall over at hour three. I came up the hands-on, from-source way, and it stuck: I still don't fully trust a system I can't reason about all the way down.
What I do now
That instinct now points at security architecture for regulated environments — banks, global brands, the places where a wrong assumption surfaces as an audit finding instead of a kernel panic. Most of the job is turning a compliance requirement nobody enjoys into Terraform guardrails and automation that quietly does the boring, safe thing for you. (The formal version lives on my résumé.) Same itch as the C64 days — I still can't leave a system alone until I've understood the whole thing — the blast radius is just bigger now.
Off the terminal
Off the keyboard, I'm a sci-fi nerd with two deep allegiances. On the Star Trek side, my shelf holds the TNG and DS9 Technical Manuals plus the internal Voyager technical guide Paramount kept in-house — and I can quote more of all three than is strictly healthy. On the Stargate side it's the 1994 film, SG-1, and Atlantis, full stop — Universe I'll defend as squandered potential more than bad TV.
Fair warning: get me started on the saucer separation in “Encounter at Farpoint” and you won't get a short answer — the saucer isn't warp-capable, so how does it separate at high warp without immediately causing, shall we say, structural integrity issues for the drive section? A photon torpedo needs a warp sustainer in order for the ship to fire a torpedo at warp and not immediately eat its own torpedo the instant it leaves the tube. And how did it later get to Deneb IV? The trip at sublight speeds would take, generously, years. When I'm not relitigating 1987 starship design, I keep a home lab around mostly so I have things to break, and I write it up here when I learn something the hard way.
Find me
If any of this resonates, email is the best way to reach me, and my code lives on GitHub.
AI disclosure
AI (specifically Claude Code) was used in the following ways on this site:
- Site structure and aesthetics
- Initial/placeholder content
- Resume writing (I am awful at these. Surely, there has to be a better way to communicate one's qualifications to prospective employers.)