Before the castle
I’ve always had a bit of a split personality between computers and music. For a while, the music side had quite an adventure of its own.
I had a band. We enjoyed a lot of success, toured Greece and Europe, and recorded 3 albums. This involved turning up at an actual recording studio, with the clock running and every hour paying for someone’s time. A fairly effective incentive to arrive prepared.
We even managed to get our own rockumentary on MTV Greece. And we finished with a bang, playing in front of an audience of 100,000 people in neighbouring Turkey.
For a long time afterwards, I thought I’d left that creative world behind. Work, responsibilities and the sensible business of being an adult seemed to have taken up the available space.
Over around 15 years, my career has taken me through cybersecurity, architecture, consulting and enterprise technical sales. Some of that work has shaped how I see things far beyond the technology.
What stays with you
During my time with Deloitte, I worked on transforming environments in the aftermath of serious breaches, including one where the entire company had ground to a halt. I saw first hand what getting decisions wrong, doing too little or acting too late could mean for everyone involved.
It was not a pretty picture. The impact on people’s lives was serious, and it reached well beyond the systems we were there to work on.
I felt some of that in my own life, too. When my eldest daughter first crawled, I wasn’t there. I was on site, watching her on my phone over video.
I still regret it.
But then I find myself thinking that I had to be there, too. Everyone had a part to play in getting the business back up and running, and I like to think I played a small but significant part in that.
That experience shapes the questions I ask now. What actually matters here? What needs to happen while we still have time to choose? What will break if we fix it? Who will have to live with the consequences if we leave it as it is?
A technically correct answer still has to work inside an organisation full of people, competing priorities and systems that somebody is quite reasonably afraid to switch off. Any useful advice has to account for that.
Back to making things
These days, I’m a Senior Solutions Architect at SpecterOps, where much of my work involves identity security and attack paths. That means understanding how someone can use the access they already have to reach something they were never supposed to touch.
Who trusts whom. Who can become whom. Which door opens the next one. And what happens when the person following that route has rather different intentions from the person who designed it.
You can probably see how I ended up with a castle.
AttackPathMan has given me a way to bring that experience into something I’d never expected to make. It has also brought me back to a part of myself I’d missed.
AI has helped make this possible by bringing some of the technical work within reach. I can explore ideas, build things and learn through doing at a pace I couldn’t previously manage. There’s still plenty to learn, and I remain responsible for deciding whether the result deserves anyone else’s time.
The adventure has brought an old friend back into the picture, too. I called Deejay Nic, from that earlier creative life, and the idea got him going again. He’s making all the music for the game. We’ve also written a song together, which we’ll be releasing soon.
Apparently, we still have some noise left in us.
This is a personal, independent project. I’m grateful to SpecterOps for supporting community work and giving me the freedom to pursue it on my own terms.
Where I want this to go
What I want to make is a game people enjoy enough to recommend to a friend. A world they’re curious to explore, with characters they remember and music that stays with them after they’ve finished playing.
And I want something else to stay with them, too: an understanding of how access, trust and relationships can connect in ways we don’t immediately see.
Great would look like someone playing AttackPathMan and later asking:
“Hang on. If someone can get in here, what else could they reach?”
Perhaps they work in security. Perhaps they’ve never had a reason to think about it before. Either way, they’ve recognised something for themselves, and now they have a useful question to ask.
Helping someone recognise a problem earlier, explain it more clearly or make a better decision while there’s still time to act would mean a lot to me.
Room to go off script
Part of this adventure is finding out how far I can take AI-assisted development and writing. I’ll be writing about the obstacles as I meet them: what worked, what failed, what I misunderstood and what I still haven’t figured out.
Someone starting out should be able to learn from that process, including the bits where I get stuck. If it helps them build something of their own or saves them a few hours of frustration, good. It will also give me somewhere to vent when something refuses to work. You may occasionally arrive during one of those moments.
Cybersecurity and the wider IT industry belong in this space just as much as the game. I have thoughts about how we work, what we reward and why we keep finding new ways to repeat familiar mistakes. Some of those thoughts will be uncomfortable. Some will need challenging.
I still think most of the problems we face are of our own making.
Computers can be tamed. People with stubborn opinions and even bigger egos are considerably harder work.
I’m willing to have my own opinions challenged, too. Otherwise, this would be a rather convenient paragraph.
Generally, I like helping people and being useful. That’s why I decided to get involved with BSides Manchester and help restart it.
Thankfully, the good Kay, my fellow co-director and organiser, is an absolute powerhouse. Kay’s sheer graft has made it possible, and keeps reminding me what determination can achieve.
However deep I’ve gone into a subject, I’m still willing to listen and learn. An old friend once told me I’m “very coachable”. I can be coachable and still disagree with you, of course, but I usually prefer to listen before opening my mouth.
Perhaps I spent enough of the earlier part of my life holding a microphone. These days, there’s something quite peaceful about letting someone else do the talking.
I’d like people to feel comfortable doing that here. Sharing an experience, questioning an idea or asking something they haven’t found a useful answer to elsewhere. And I’d love to discover that something I made gave someone else the confidence to try an idea they’d been putting off.
The people who make it possible
For me, making room for this creative part of my life again already means something. Great would mean keeping it there, making things with people I enjoy working with and having something I’m proud to share with my daughters, while being there for the life happening around it.
None of this would have been possible without my wife’s continued support. And, oh boy, do I admire her. For everything she stands for and everything she’s accomplished, including running her own company while being more present for our family than I ever have.
How she still finds the patience for me taking on another project is something of a miracle. I know I’m on borrowed time.
What I choose to spend that time on matters to me, as does knowing when to close the laptop. (If anyone has worked out how, please let me know. My family will start sending you postcards every Christmas.)