TL;DR
I’m very happy to say that I received Gold in the WorldSkills Australia Cyber Security Regional, held this Monday (10/08). I completed every challenge for a perfect score of 30/30 and was the first competitor to reach full completion.
The competition was an individual CTF-like event covering a wide range of security work including incident response, web security, forensics, packet analysis, password cracking, privilege escalation and container security. I quite enjoyed how much I had to move between different areas rather than being able to rely on one thing I already knew well.
Appreciation
This result means a lot to me for reasons beyond the medal. A lot has changed in my life over the last few months and WorldSkills has ended up being tied quite closely to that change.
A few months ago, I entered the WorldSkills Australia Cloud Computing Regional partly because I thought it sounded interesting and partly because I wanted to see how I would go in a serious competition. I ended up receiving Gold with 95/100. Cloud was never irrelevant to me and it certainly is not now. I still want to keep developing in it, particularly around cloud security and the point where infrastructure and security meet. Cyber security has been the direction I have wanted to build my career around since I was quite young but I see cloud as part of that rather than some unrelated path I happened to try once.
Winning Cloud also started a lot of the upwards momentum that has brought me here.
I especially want to thank Elan. After the Cloud Regional, he took the time to meet with me and talk properly about WorldSkills, Cloud, Cyber Security and what I could do next. He gave me guidance, encouraged me to keep developing and took what I had done seriously at a point when I was still figuring out how seriously I should take myself, let alone the result of the competition. His support mattered a lot to me personally. I am genuinely grateful for the time he has given me and I hope his preparation for the international competition in Shanghai is going well.
I also want to thank Sawan for the advice he gave me while I was preparing for Cyber Security. He gave me helpful direction on some of the pressure points, particularly the importance of developing broadly rather than becoming comfortable in one area. I spent the time between Cloud Computing and Cyber Security working across offensive and defensive security, networking, systems, web, forensics and problem-solving in general. Fortunately, that preparation ended up matching the competition extremely well. I now appreciate having someone experienced help me work out where my gaps were.
Another part of my life also changed quite significantly. In July, I joined CI-ISAC Australia as a Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst, which has become my professional role in cyber security. I especially want to thank Andrew for trusting me with the opportunity early in my career and giving me a chance to prove myself.
Working in threat intelligence is already changing parts of the way I think. In a competition, there is normally a flag, score, checkmark or some other fairly objective way to know whether I got something right or wrong. Proper analysis is much messier. I have to think about what the evidence actually supports, where my inferences are, my confidence and what someone else might do based on what I write. I definitely still have an enormous amount to learn but I am very grateful to Andrew and my colleagues for giving me the opportunity to continue learning.
Separately, I owe a pretty big thank you to Matthew Holt and the Caddy project. Realistically, Matt trusted me with maintainer responsibility in a mature project before I had much conventional standing and that trust has had a pretty large effect on how I work now. Caddy taught me that being capable is not just about getting to an answer quickly. I have submitted changes I thought were right and then had somebody find cases I missed. I have been wrong. I have had to explain my reasoning, accept review, fix mistakes properly and take responsibility for work that other people will depend on. I have also learnt when to push back, when to ask questions and when the best change might be simply no change at all. I am very grateful to Matt and everyone else in the Caddy community who has spent their time reviewing my work, co-reviewing alongside me and helping me improve across the board.
There are also a few people from much earlier in my story who deserve to be here. Kelly Brickell, Ashley Berry and Sarah Bradtke, along with the wider staff at The Industry School, supported me when I had far less idea where I was going than I do now. My path through school was not exactly conventional and they gave me room to learn differently, pursue the things I was actually interested in and keep moving when I did not have a plan for what came next. Looking back now, it would be easy to make my path sound deliberate or like I had everything neatly aligned. It really was not and I truly did not. A lot of it was me trying things, changing direction, finding something I cared about and having good people around me who kept supporting me while I worked it out.
Of course, I owe a huge amount to my parents and family, especially my mother. LinkedIn, a portfolio and my open-source work tend to show the parts that are easy for me to summarise after the fact, like a medal, my job and my projects. They do not show the long drives, equipment, patience, encouragement, uncertainty, sudden changes in plans, late nights or all the ordinary help underneath them. My family has supported a fairly unreasonable amount of time spent learning things, building things and pursuing opportunities where none of us could possibly know what the outcome would be. I truly would not be here without them.
Congratulations
Thank you again to the judges, Elan and Sawan, as well as WorldSkills Australia, the organisers and everyone who helped put the Cyber Security Regional together. One reason WorldSkills has become important to me is that it gives me a very direct way of testing and comparing myself. I can spend months thinking I understand something or assuming I do not understand something as well as I actually do but eventually I am given practical problems, limited time and a scoreboard. I am forced to reason through the work. Both Cloud and Cyber have shown me areas where I understood more than I may have given myself credit for, as well as areas where I still have plenty to improve.
I also want to congratulate the Silver and Bronze medallists, along with everyone else who competed. I will leave it to the other competitors to share their names and results publicly if they wish but there was some genuinely strong work across the field and I am glad I got to compete alongside them.
Closing
When I posted about winning Cloud Computing Gold in May, I finished with: “I’m looking forward to continuing with WorldSkills by keeping the Cloud pathway open and preparing seriously for the Cyber Security Regionals in August.” Three months later, I am very glad I followed through on that.
Cyber security was already where I wanted to go before either competition. What changed between May and August was that my path stopped feeling nearly as hypothetical. I won Cloud, met people who gave me useful guidance and took me seriously, kept learning through open-source, started my first professional cyber role and then came back to WorldSkills and managed to solve everything they put in front of me.
I am proud of the Gold. I am proud that I finished every challenge. I am proud to look back at how I have improved.
When I give myself some time to look at how I got here, the part I value most is the number of people who have given me time, advice, criticism, encouragement and trust before there was any guarantee I would do anything useful with it.
P.S.
I still have an enormous amount to learn. I want to keep getting better across cyber security, cloud and the infrastructure that lies underneath both. I am very interested to see where this path takes me next.