The grind
After leaving Marine Corps regular duty I was, briefly, homeless. I climbed out by brute effort: a full-time job as a light mechanic and pump jockey at one Chevron station, graveyard shifts on weekends at another, and Marine Reserves one weekend a month and two weeks a year. All the while I carried a full, self-funded courseload at Arizona State University and taught myself software development. Nobody handed me the runway; I built it shift by shift.
Somewhere in that stretch I bought a used Mustang and rebuilt its engine in my dorm room. It was the same model-the-mechanism instinct from the LEGO years, now turned on a V8. The rebuild cheerfully ignored every dorm rule.
That period is the taproot of the “experience over credentials” conviction that runs through my whole career. I know exactly what it costs to earn the knowledge, because I earned mine the hard way, broke and exhausted, and never stopped.
Learning to hack
My roommate plugged me into the real early-’90s Arizona hacker scene. Around 1993 he introduced me to people who were, or became, serious figures in it:
- Tom Jackiewicz, a white-hat hacker and the author of the first book on OpenLDAP, who later worked on Office 365 incident response at Microsoft.
- Andre Gironda, years later my networking partner at Corrigo. The friendship started here, in the AZ scene, long before we were colleagues.
I learned real offensive technique from that community. The same knowledge, pointed at defense, became the foundation of a cybersecurity career. It’s also why, decades later, a room full of MIT PhDs leaned on me as the practitioner, because I came up among the people who actually did it. The NeoPrime entry has that story.
Why it matters: the throughline
Grit + street-level offensive knowledge + Marine Corps discipline = the practitioner. Every “experience over credentials” moment later in the story traces back to these years: holding my own among PhDs, being the one who could actually build and break things.
Key people
- Tom Jackiewicz, white-hat, OpenLDAP author, later on Office 365 incident response at Microsoft.
- Andre Gironda, later Corrigo networking partner. The relationship began here.
Technologies / craft
Early-’90s offensive security from the real underground, self-taught software development, and Unix/networking fundamentals. It’s the hands-on foundation under everything that followed.