Bash99

Elementary school. Texas Instruments computer in the classroom. Every other kid was playing games. I was writing BASIC — making the screen change colors, making it produce sounds. The teacher pulled me aside for wasting valuable time on the computer. That was 1979. Nothing has changed.

At home we had our own TI — that's where I practiced. When we graduated to a Windows PC, my dad had one rule: if my brother and I broke the OS — and we broke it constantly — we fixed it ourselves. No exceptions. Reload the OS, figure it out, or it stays broken. That's still how I operate. Break things. Understand why. Put it back together better.

I got my first job at 15 and a half — workers permit, waiting tables, helping the family keep the lights on and buying computer parts with whatever was left. I've never stopped working since. Bartended through school. Did what needed doing. That's not a complaint — that's a baseline.

By my early twenties I was so burned out on computers I deliberately walked away. Got my real estate license. Made $10k a month. Thought I was out. Then the brokerages figured out I could keep their networks running and dragged me back in — and honestly, they loved me for it. Computers weren't done with me. Three years in real estate taught me how to sell, negotiate, and read a room. Every enterprise engagement since has used those skills.

1997. Unisys. Fly-and-fix field team. We rolled out the Y2K fix across the entire Social Security Administration. Visited nearly every state in the US — Thursday to Monday, week after week. One of the largest coordinated government IT deployments in history. I was on the ground for it.

2001. Tech bubble burst. Got laid off from a $250k job at GE Spacenet in Northern VA — living the life one day, back in Richmond with nothing the next. That year hit hard on multiple fronts. Building something wasn't just about the money — it was about having something to show up for every day. Unemployment running out, no plan. So I downloaded pirated copies of Dreamweaver and Flash because I couldn't afford Adobe, and taught myself HTML, CSS, Java, and Flash from scratch. Built a portfolio. Landed VCU Art School, shops in Carytown, ecommerce clients. Started ProFilesPC — web, graphic design, security, and network consulting — $125k working from home. First thing I did when the money came in was buy a legal copy of the Adobe suite.

That's also where I first encountered automation. Dreamweaver added FTP — upload a site live without touching a terminal. A manual process, gone. That thought never left.

I've hardened the networks that move energy across continents, route the calls of hundreds of millions, and process the transactions of global finance. When critical infrastructure needs to be secured — gas & oil majors, telecom carriers, Fortune 500 enterprises — I'm the one they call.

Zero Trust architecture isn't a framework to me — it's production code running across some of the most complex, high-stakes environments on the planet. I've seen what breaks. I've seen what holds.

By night, I'm building what the industry doesn't have yet: AI security tooling that applies the same runtime monitoring principles proven in network security to the new attack surface — LLMs. LLMGuardT2. CloudGuard. badash-killchain. Not demos. Not tutorials. Real scanners, real detection, running in production.

The shift from signature-based detection to behavioral ML in network security took a decade. In AI security, it's happening in months. I'm not watching it happen — I'm building the guardrails.

BadAshWednesdays — weekly deep dives on AI security, SASE architecture, and building at the edge of what's possible. No fluff. No theory. Just the work.