You know that moment when you realize your career has taken a completely unexpected turn? Mine came when I was sitting in a boardroom at a major insurance company, explaining to executives why their "secure" Azure environment could be compromised in about fifteen minutes. The silence was deafening.
My journey here wasn't linear. I started fixing copiers at Xerox and Ricoh—yeah, those massive machines that somehow always jammed during important presentations. From there, I bounced through Software Development, became a SharePoint Consultant (which prepared me for dealing with impossible problems), worked as an architect, and eventually found myself as a Cloud Security Architect and Security Researcher.
The thing is, every role taught me something different about how organizations really work versus how they think they work. When you're the guy fixing the printer, you see how people actually handle security badges and passwords. When you'r