I started in 2008 as a system administrator, looking after Active Directory, Windows Server and the network for every department of a municipality.
That job taught me how systems actually fail. Almost never with a dramatic exploit. Usually with a permission nobody reviewed, a service nobody owned, or a backup nobody had restored. That instinct has shaped every report I have written since.
I moved into offensive work in 2013 and stayed there. Freelance web and WordPress testing, then Linux administration and shared-hosting pentests at MKHOST, application and API security at Thor IT Solutions, and SIEM engineering for DSS, a New York MSSP. Today I secure the production platform behind Rumble.com, its CDN, Locals.com and Rumble Cloud. I reproduce and score bug bounty submissions, run Wazuh detection, and verify that fixes actually hold.
Somewhere in between I became an Official Wazuh Ambassador, published findings against open-source bug bounty software and widely used WordPress plugins, and built vulnerable labs that other people use to practise.
The thread through all of it is verification. A finding is not real until it is reproduced. A fix is not real until it is retested. That is the standard I hold my own work to, and the standard I would want applied to mine.