I’m keeping going with my AI/ML cert from Imperial College London, I’m not taking any UOLWW Cyber Security masters modules this presentation (next 3 months).. instead I’m focusing on the AI/ML cert and other commitments. Instead of focusing on researcher roles, which was my former idea, I hope to position myself as a devops expert with knowledge and qualifications in security (DevSecOps) and ML (MLOps). This positioning will build on my existing experience to allow the shortest path to get to where I want to be. For this, I am targetting finishing this masters course (eventually), the Imperial College ML cert, AWS Associate Architect cert, and a Kubernates Cert. This will tie in with my career experience thus far (20 years of mostly software and devops) the hobby homelab stuff I’ve been doing (lots of docker, docker compose, Linux, Mikrotik, networking), and the qualifications I’m studying.

So, what have I been doing lately? I have been studying my Imperial College Machine Learning Profesisonal Certificate, and that has been totally kicking my arse, as it is hardcore maths, and I am but a simple man. I have been studying the Applied Crytography module for my Masters degree at Royal Holloway, University of London. I have submitted the exam, but I don’t feel confident that I’m not going to have to resit it. “So it goes”. I have been building up the new setup, both the WFH/study from home workstation and the homelab/home network at the new place that we moved into on the 1st December. It is NEARLY there, and when it is “finished” I will share photos so you can see the work I’ve done. It honestly has been a huge amount of work, but it should result in a setup that pays off over the years I hope to be in this home. We have been building IKEA furniture and getting things sorted in the new place, while ferrying equipment and books and so on from the storage unit to the new place. I have been reading more, as I have a nice reading setup at the new place with a proper armchair, footrest and reading light. You can see the reviews I’ve put up on davidcraddockreads.com We had a low-key xmas and new years eve, just my wife and I and our cat. It was still good. I have been leading the Cyber Security Leaders Challenge University of London Worldwide team, and we have got through to the first qualifiers, which is good news. I will be having regular meetings around that while we work up to the competition qualifier. I have been out on my bike quite a bit, you can follow my progress recorded onto Strava by my bike computer on the ‘my bike’ page

The last retrospective I wrote was in August of this year . At that time, we were still in the old house in Withington desperately waiting for it to sell, and all our possessions were in storage crates. Everything was very chaotic. Fast-forward a few months, and I’m pleased to report that things have settled down. The house finally sold, we moved out (thanks a lot to my friends I made from the Retro Gaming Meetup, who helped us move!), and we moved all our stuff into a storage unit in Bolton, while we moved with Betty our cat into a pet-friendly AirBnB . We bounced between 3 AirBnB places, while looking for a long-term rental. For some reason, finding a long-term rental, even on the outskirts of Manchester, even with the ability to put down 6 months rent in advance, was difficult! The advantage of bouncing between AirBnB places is that we quickly found out that we did not want to move to Bolton after all, which was our initially intended destination. Instead, we found that the Preston and South Ribble areas were MUCH better suited to what we wanted. At the start of December we finally moved in to a long-term rental in Buckshaw Village, Chorley. We now live in a rented new-build house with 3 bathrooms (!) and a train station 8 minutes walk away that runs half-hourly trains to Manchester. During this time I have continued to study for my Master’s degree in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London , via distance learning. I have been taking on additional extracurricular activities for the UOLWW Cyber Security Student Society , where I have been appointed vice-president. I have also been upskilling on GenAI and doing my best to follow the absurdly rapid rate of progress in research around AI and deep learning. In December, I realised that I needed to have a more formal qualification in AI/ML/GenAI because it is becoming so ‘key’ to modern technology. I signed up for a 7-month professional certificate in AI/ML at Imperial College London , again distance learning, that I will study alongside my masters degree and the other upskilling I am doing. I have registered my new business at Companies House, “Straylight Research Ltd” . At the moment I have not done any work to progress it, but it will eventually be an ‘umbrella’ for self-employed business activities I end up doing. I have done quite a bit of contract work in the past but not had a formal company to place it under, which has caused problems. I also intend to build a SaaS product around Cyber Security and GenAI to try and build up some passive income. Additionally, we have now moved in fully to the new place, and we have a whole new set of IKEA furniture installed thanks to Conny’s flat-pack skills, and a full network cabinet, and a gigabit broadband connection, and all the things you miss while technically ‘homeless’ and bouncing around AirBnBs. I have upgraded and repaired my e-bike setup , so now it is much more of what I envisaged as a ‘car replacement’ and I use it heavily for exercise and just general errands. ...

I hold a joint honours degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, although I graduated over 20 years ago, so the AI knowledge I was taught is no longer very uptodate! I have therefore signed up for a 7 month certificate at Imperial College London where I will be updating my knowledge on AI and ML, including learning about LLMs. This is in order to position myself to work best in the intersection between Cyber Security, AI and software engineering.

I have signed up for a 7 month professional certificate in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Imperial College London! I never thought I’d get the opportunity to study at the University of London in any capacity, but now I’m studying at two UOL colleges at the same time! (even though Imperial is technically independent from the UOL college network nowadays). So I will be balancing my Cyber Security MSc taught by Royal Holloway, which I’m undertaking in part-time mode, with this part-time course in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Imperial College London. ...

I have founded my first company! As of a few days ago, Straylight Research Ltd is registered at the UK companies house. While I will be using this business as a catch-all holding for anything I do that is self-employed, the main focus though will be on building a software product that bridges the worlds of GenAI and Cyber Security. I am currently reading a lot of business books and self-employment sites to figure out just how to go about this, and how to market this product effectively. ...

The dust has settled on our move to Preston. After months and months being out of action, a serious upgrade, and two bike services, my Tern e-cargo bike is back in action! I am so happy to have it back in good working order! I had an excellent experience with Leisure Lakes Bikes in Preston, who I highly recommend and will be taking my bike to for any and all future services. ...

We’ve decided to rent a place in Preston, instead of Bolton. Preston still has reasonable train links into central Manchester, and offers a much cheaper rental market, and housing market. It also has great food and great cycling routes nearby. The neighbourhood we’re looking at is in South Ribble, so not technically in Preston, but it might as well be considered so. It is a very, very nice area with very large, very cheap, very peaceful homes. ...

We finally did it!! After 3+ years of attempting to sell our house, it has finally completed and we’ve moved out! I’m so happy! We are currently based around the Bolton/Preston area, looking to move into a rented place somewhere near Bolton transport links. We will be staying in this location until I’ve finished my ’learning sabbatical’ which involves studying for my distance learning MSc in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, getting my OSCP+ cert (Offensive Security Certified Pentester), and some other certs and learning goals which I haven’t fully defined yet. ...

I have been recently spending quite a lot of time working on the Hugo blog framework that I use to build all my web content and serve it up in static format. I think I will be moving over to using Github pages to serve my Hugo content for all blogs, because I don’t see any advantage to hosting it locally - I have already learned how to do that now, and the very real advantage to hosting on Github.io is that when my home server is down, my blogs are still up and readable. To that end, I have been working on Github actions to automate Hugo building and deployment to Github pages. I now have a good, working, pipeline that I can re-use on all 6 of my Hugo blog domains. I have also been adding some scripts locally for easier post authoring, which means it’s much easier for me to write content in a standard way and get started with a post without too much faffing about. I have finally fixed a problem that had been annoying me for ages - when I post my blog posts to social media, they used to look rubbish - just a static generic blog image showing my face, and no explanation of the content or a post-specific thumbnail. - In order to fix this, I have developed my own ‘spinoff’ of the Hugo PaperMod theme, called PaperMod-dpc . In this customised theme, I have made some improvements and adjustments for my own needs, including an ‘intelligent’ way of handling the social media opengraph data, where it will display much better and interesting preview content on social media.