Cyberbits

  • 7 WordPress plugins I install before the theme

    Introduction Forget the “Top 50 Essential Plugins” lists. Most plugins are bloated garbage that slow your site to a crawl. After a decade of debugging sites at 3 AM, I’ve narrowed it down to seven pieces of infrastructure. These handle the invisible work, being speed, security, and not losing data. Akismet Anti-spam by Automattic –…

  • Google’s Linux and SQL

    Introduction Another post in the Google’s Cybersecurity Professional Certificate series. As always, I’ll share the cliff notes on the courses as I go. Dense summaries of what actually matters. Today: Tools of the Trade: Linux and SQL Your first vulnerability Before your OS even loads, you’re already exposed. Computers boot via BIOS (legacy) or UEFI…

  • Google’s Networks and Network Security

    Introduction As part of tackling the Google’s Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, I’ll share the cliff notes on the courses as I go. Dense summaries of what actually matters. Today: Connect and Protect: Networks and Network Security Traffic and architecture An entry level analyst parses logs and analyzes traffic across network layers. Physical infrastructure includes firewalls (first…

  • Google’s Manage Security Risks

    Introduction As previously said, I’m tackling Google’s Cybersecurity Professional Certificate and I’ll share the cliff notes as I go. Dense summaries of what actually matters. Today: Play It Safe: Manage Security Risks Security domains and risk management Security teams organize their work across eight critical domains, ranging from governance (Security and Risk Management) to hands-on…

  • Google’s Foundations of Cybersecurity

    Introduction Years of platform engineering gave me the infrastructure fundamentals, and beyond; now I’m retooling for security. I’m tackling Google’s Cybersecurity Professional Certificate first (CompTIA Security+ next), and I’ll share the cliff notes as I go. Dense summaries of what actually matters. Kickoff: Google Foundations of Cybersecurity. Analysts and engineers Analysts man the walls, monitoring…

  • Oneshot secured Hetzner VPS

    Introduction A complete, automated WordPress hosting solution using OpenTofu, Docker, and Traefik. Deploy a secure, fast WordPress site to Hetzner Cloud in minutes with TLS, caching, and security hardening out of the box. Find the code here. Update: I’ve split the code into 3 repos, making it more scalable for future deployments. Deploy them in…

  • From platform engineer to threat hunter

    Introduction I’ve spent the last decade automating everything that moves. Turning VMs into containers, containers into orchestrated workloads, and Git repos into self-healing production platforms. I’m a Kubernetes platform engineer by trade, addicted to GitOps, service meshes, and the beautiful chaos of multi-cluster architectures. But lately? I’ve been spending more time thinking about how to…