I spent 17 years in hospitality before I ever touched a security tool. Most of that time was fine dining, high volume rooms where the margin for error was thin and the pace never let up. I didn’t know it yet, but that work taught me things I use every day now: how to stay calm when something breaks, how to read a room, how to explain something complicated to someone who just needs the short version.

In 2025 I enrolled in Per Scholas Philadelphia’s Cybersecurity Analyst Program. I graduated in January 2026 with a CompTIA Security+ certification and a portfolio of labs and investigations. Since then I’ve worked as an IT Infrastructure Support Technician at the Philadelphia Housing Authority, focused on identity and access administration, and as a Cloud Security Operations intern at LOG(N) Pacific, working in Microsoft Sentinel and KQL.

Along the way I started noticing a pattern. Every problem I ran into, whether it was a locked account, a misconfigured permission, or a security alert that needed context, traced back to the same few things: identity, infrastructure, documentation, and communication. Cybersecurity started to feel less like a destination and more like a byproduct of how well those underlying systems work.

That’s the lens I bring now, and it’s why I’ve started building with AI as part of my work rather than around it. At PHA I scoped and got approval for a local AI assistant to help reduce repetitive support requests, and I’m currently writing the documentation that will become its knowledge base. It’s not deployed yet. I’m building it the same way I do everything else: carefully, and in the open.

I’m bilingual in English and Spanish, based in Philadelphia, and active in the local cybersecurity community through Blue Team Village, DC215, and IWCA. This site is where I document what I’m learning as I go, including the parts I got wrong before I got them right.