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2024 Recap and Plans for 2025

· 2 min read

2024 was a year of growth and a fair bit of improvisation. Sure, I didn’t check off everything on my to-do list, but I ended up achieving things I hadn’t planned for—things that genuinely made me happy.

One of the biggest shifts? I moved to beautiful Spain 🇪🇸

✅ Landed a new job at Semrush.

✅ Earned the Splunk Search Expert Specialization on Coursera—super practical and worth it.

✅ Got the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification.

✅ Read some good books on coding and cybersecurity:

  • Practical Threat Detection Engineering, by Jason Deyalsingh, Gary J. Katz, Megan Roddie
  • Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming, by Luciano Ramalho
  • Container Security: Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications, by Liz Rice
  • Python Tricks: A Buffet of Awesome Python Features, by Dan Bader
  • Kubernetes Security and Observability by Amit Gupta and Brendan Creane
  • Application Security Program Handbook, by Derek Fisher
  • Defensive Security Handbook, by Lee Brotherston and Amanda Berlin
  • Exploring Splunk, by David Carasso

✅ Reduced my phone screen time to under 60 minutes a day.

✅ Travelled to Thailand 🇹🇭 and Portugal 🇵🇹

Quote

"A dream written down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan. A plan backed by action makes your dreams come true." - Greg S. Reid

2025​

Let's draw some plans for 2025 now

Tech​

Courses I want to take:

  • Splunk Knowledge Manager Specialization
  • Splunk Core Certified Power User

Ranks on HTB (rolled from 2024):

  • Noob

Get certified in:

  • CompTIA SecurityX

Read:

  • Crafting the InfoSec Playbook: Security Monitoring and Incident Response Master Plan, by Jeff Bollinger, Brandon Enright, Matthew Valites
  • The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws, by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto
  • Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People, by Aditya Bhargava

Personal​

Digital Wellbeing:

  • Stop reading the news from places that I have left years ago

Exercise:

  • Run regularly

Read:

Dune trilogy, by Frank Herbert :

  • Dune
  • Dune Messiah
  • Children of Dune

Write:

  • Write more posts, create a telegram channel

Travel:

  • Australia