Hello, prairie.

This site is a rebuild. The old one was a WordPress install I’d stopped updating last year, and every time I meant to write something there I’d spend the evening fighting a theme instead of tapping out anything worthwhile. So I tore it down and built this one from scratch — Astro, CSS, and a field journal aesthetic that actually matches how I think about the work.

What I want to write about here

Three loose buckets, in decreasing order of certainty:

• Security culture as a practice, not a poster. What it actually takes to shift behavior in a regulated organization, drawn from years of running awareness programs and a lot of reading in behavioral science. Less fear, more craft.
• AI-enabled cyber deception. Ongoing notes from Project Ossian — what realistic decoy infrastructure looks like when LLMs are in the loop, what attackers do when they hit it, and what defenders can learn from running the tape back.
• Field reports. Whatever I’m thinking about from the day job: threat modeling, SOC 2 drudgery, the weird dance of getting security work prioritized inside a buisness, what it’s like being the security engineer in the room where it happens

Why prairie

I live in Des Moines and grew up on the great plains of South Dakota. I know the prarie like an old friend and honestly it’s a better metaphor for security work than a glowing terminal: layered, patient, most of what matters hidden beneath the surface, nothing quick about it. The visual identity of this site leans on that — ochre and bluestem, oak shadow and seed heads — because I wanted something that spoke to the organic nature I see at the heart of cybersecurity practice: the people!

More soon. If you want to follow along, the RSS feed lives at /rss.xml.