My name is Arlo Hollingshad and I’ve been in the Network Security space for about 8 years now. A consistent refrain that I hear from people at all different levels is how hard it is to keep up. Whether that’s keeping up with emergent threats, new tools, updates to existing tools, or even just the organization you work with, it’s almost a full time job by itself. I work almost exclusively with the Palo Alto Networks technology stack these days, and it’s still overwhelming. To compound things, learning things on the internet seems to be video-based. Whether it’s Youtube, CBTNuggets, Udemy, or some other site, video is king right now.

That doesn’t work well for me.

I like having resources I can reference, search, build flash cards, rewrite, and none of that is possible for videos (unless you want to rely on ChatGPT to do it for you, which I think defeats the point).

Thus this blog was born. My goal here is to demonstrate the journey, and hopefully teach a few people a thing or two along the way. I’ll have two main kinds of posts:

1. Tech Notes - Generally these will be my resources for certification exams or deployment guides. They’ll be focused on a particular topic, with the intent to serve as a study or administrative guide.
2. Field Notes - These posts will dive into the consequences and context; they’re stories and case studies that attempt to clarify that blurry line between “I understand that for the exam” and “I can deploy that in production”.

So follow along, and let’s learn something together.

All thoughts are my own and do not represent the views of my employer or any vendors mentioned explicitly or implicitly.