This isn’t a post about Microsoft Defender. There’s no KQL. Nobody named Todd left a storage account open.
This one is about something else entirely.
I’ve been in IT for 25 years. I’ve spent the last 15 of those in security: building programs, leading teams, arguing about NIST frameworks, and spending more time than I’d like to admit staring at alert queues at odd hours. It’s work I genuinely care about, and I’m good at it.
But somewhere around year 20, something changed. Not in the work. In me.
My son Brendan got into an agriculture program in high school. I’m not sure either of us knew exactly what that would set in motion.
It Started With Goats
Brendan’s first year in the ag program was goats. And pigs, but, pigs aren’t as much fun to talk about. Between the two of them, though, he learned what it meant to be responsible for an animal. Not in a theoretical way, but in the way where the animal needs you whether you feel like showing up or not. Early mornings. Feeding schedules. The particular kind of patience that comes from working with something that has its own agenda and doesn’t much care about yours.
His second year, he moved to cattle, and that’s when the whole family got pulled in. There’s something about cattle specifically that’s hard to explain if you haven’t been around them. They’re big, they’re stubborn, they’re expensive, and they will absolutely find the one weak spot in your fence on the one day you didn’t check it. They also have personalities. They know you. They respond to you in ways that make you feel, against all rational judgment, genuinely attached to them. They’re much more fun than people give them credit for.
We were not prepared for how attached we would get.
The Community
What I didn’t expect, what genuinely surprised me, was the people. My family comes from small communities, places where you know your neighbor, and you are there to lend a hand if needed. The cattle show community is similar, and it’s different enough from your traditional “professional” communities as to stand out. I’ve been in a lot of professional spaces over the years: IT conferences, security forums, industry groups. They’re fine, useful, and sometimes warm. They are rarely, though, community, or team.
The cattle community is different in a way that’s hard to quantify but immediately obvious when you’re in it. These are people who will stop on the side of the road to help a stranger with a trailer problem. Who will drive an hour to lend you a piece of equipment. Who remember your kid’s name and your animal’s name and ask about both. Who treat showing as a shared endeavor rather than a pure competition, even when the competition is real and the stakes matter. Outside the ring? That’s community. Inside the ring? Competition, but the community is still present.
I didn’t go looking for that community. It came with the cattle. And I’m genuinely grateful for it, in ways I didn’t fully understand until the summer of 2025.
The Summer of 2025
We’d gone up to Bartow for an HBBA show. It was the kind of Florida heat that makes you question every life decision that led you to be outside in it; the kind of heat that, when you step into it, makes you think your skin might melt right off. The weekend after Memorial Day, a two-day adventure into the heart of Florida, with our cattle friends coming along for the ride. Brendan’s heifer, Montana, had a good day. She won her class and placed third overall. Alana’s steer, Cash, won his class, too. A genuinely good show for both of them, for both kids. Cash was Alana’s main project for the year, her animal, her work, her responsibility in the way that FFA projects are supposed to be. They both left Bartow as winners.
The drive home should have been the easy part.
It wasn’t.
About halfway back, the trailer kicked. Hard. The kind of kick that you feel in your chest before you understand what it means. I knew something was wrong before I’d finished pulling off the road.
What I found when I got to the back of the trailer, I’m not going to describe in detail because some things don’t need to be. Montana and Cash had gotten tangled somehow, despite being on opposite sides of the trailer. One had gone down. In the chaos that followed, both of them ended up in a position nobody could have anticipated, and nobody could have prevented once it started.
We got them down. It took everything we had, physically and otherwise. We sat there on the side of the road, panels down, back door open, the four of us in various states of shock, and watched the light go out of their eyes.
Watched the kids cry.
There is no security framework for that moment. No incident response playbook. No alert that fires and tells you what to do next. You just sit there, on the asphalt, in the heat, and you feel it.
Montana had won her class and placed third overall that day. Cash had won his class. Neither of them made it home.
What Happened Next
Word tends to travel fast in any community and, that day last summer, it certainly traveled fast through the cattle community.
I’m still not entirely sure of the full sequence. It’s the kind of thing that happens while you’re still in shock, still trying to process what you just lost. But the breeder and Alana’s FFA advisor put something in motion. And it grew. People reached out. People who knew us, people who barely knew us, people who knew someone who knew us. The community that I’d come to appreciate over the previous couple of years showed up in a way I didn’t expect and won’t forget.
We were able to get Alana a new steer. His name was Tex.
Millie, a heifer that had been Brendan’s project in a prior year, came back on a lease arrangement. Alana showed both of them for the remainder of the year.
Alana and her new animals made it to the Manatee County Fair.
She showed. She competed. She did the thing she’d been working toward, with animals that came to her because a community of people decided that a kid shouldn’t have to lose her whole year because of something that happened on a highway on the way home from a show.
I don’t have adequate words for what that meant to our family. I’m not sure adequate words exist.
The Dream
I said at the beginning that something changed in me around year 20 of this career. The cattle are part of that. The community is part of that. Watching Brendan grow through the ag program, and then watching Alana follow him into it, and then watching what happened when things fell apart and people showed up anyway, all of that is part of that.
There’s a version of the future I think about sometimes. A small cattle operation. Nothing enormous, nothing that replaces the day job. Something real, though. Something with acreage and animals and the early mornings that come with both.
And something else: a way to help kids who want to get into agriculture programs like FFA and 4-H but can’t afford the entry point. Because the entry point is real. The costs of animals, of equipment, of show fees, it adds up fast, and not every family can absorb it. The thing that changed our family, the community that showed up for us when we needed it, I’d like to be part of making that available to a kid who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it.
That’s not a business plan. It’s not even a fully formed goal yet. It’s just something I know I want, the way you know certain things without being able to fully explain them.
Why I’m Writing This Here
This blog is supposed to be about security, IT, and maybe tied to a little fun. Microsoft Defender, Entra ID, and the grizzled PI in the basement, and while I will continue that, I want to emphasize what’s important here. I’ve been thinking about why I started this at all, and the honest answer? It’s about the journey. Not part of the journey, but the whole journey, both technical and professional, and personal and life.
25 years in this industry teaches you a lot of things. How to build a security program. How to have a hard conversation with executive leadership. How to read a threat landscape and prioritize what actually matters versus what just looks bad in a report. But the thing it teaches you most, if you’re paying attention, is that you cannot plan for everything. You build the controls, you write the playbooks, you tune the detections, and then something happens that none of those things anticipated. And in that moment, what matters isn’t the framework. It’s what you do next. It’s who shows up.
That lesson doesn’t come from a certification. It doesn’t come from a NIST document. It comes from experience, from living through things that didn’t go the way you planned, in and out of the technical world.
June 1st last year was one of those moments for our family. We’d done everything right. The animals were healthy, the trailer was checked, the show was a success, and then something happened anyway, on a highway in the middle of Florida, that no amount of preparation could have prevented. What happened after that, the community, the support, Tex and Millie, Alana at the Manatee County Fair, that was the response capability. The thing you build not because you think you’ll need it, but because you know that someday you will.
The security community works the same way. And I don’t mean conferences, though those have their place. I mean the quieter version of it. The peer you call when something is actively on fire and you need a second brain. The ISAC thread where someone posts an indicator at 11 PM and three people from different organizations respond within the hour because they’ve seen it too. The person you met at a training three years ago who sends you a message out of nowhere saying “hey, did you see this advisory, thought of you.” The LinkedIn connection who turns into a genuine professional relationship because you both cared enough about the same problem to actually talk about it. That community, that personal connection? That’s one of the biggest pieces of IT, be it operations, security, or any other part of IT. People are what make the job possible, and those connections with people? That’s what gets you through the roughest times.
That kind of connection is getting rarer. Remote work, distributed teams, the general fragmentation of how we all operate now, it works against the kind of organic professional community that used to form more naturally. It works against building that community, even locally in your own neighborhood. People are more isolated than they realize, in security and everywhere else. Isolation is a liability. Not just personally, but operationally and professionally. The organizations with strong external networks, the practitioners who invest in genuine peer relationships, the teams that participate in ISACs and share threat intelligence, the ones that actually pick up the phone when a colleague or friend is struggling, those are the ones that find out about the threat before it finds them. Those are the ones that get the call saying “we just saw this, watch your environment.” That’s how you get people to show up. You build the community. You support them the way you hope they’ll support you. Sounds kind of like the Golden Rule from back in Kindergarten, doesn’t it?
Community isn’t a soft skill. In security, in IT in general, and in life, it’s a capability. It’s how you get people to show up for you, for your organization, for you and your family, internally and externally, and helps build a foundation for the future. That foundation? That’s how you know you can breathe when the hurricane blows hardest.
The cattle community showed up for our family in a way we didn’t expect and couldn’t have engineered. It happened because relationships had been built over time, because people genuinely look out for each other, because that’s simply how that community operates. The breeder and the FFA advisor made some calls, and those calls turned into Tex and Millie and Alana at the county fair. It shouldn’t be any different in the professional world. Showing up for your friends and colleagues, and having them show up for you, makes the job doable. Sitting in a corner by yourself? Sure, you can do a lot of work uninterrupted. But when something goes wrong, and you don’t have support, what then?
I want to be that kind of resource in the security community. Not just someone who goes to work, does a job, and stops, and not someone who sits behind a keyboard posting things on the internet without any real thought, but someone who’s genuinely part of the network. Someone who shares what he knows, learns from what others share, and shows up when someone needs a second set of eyes, or just a peer who’s been through something similar. Building a community, or even building a team at work (in essence, a focused community), is how we survive in a world full of constant change and, in many ways, constant struggle.
That’s part of what I want this blog to be. Not a platform, but a contribution to a community that has given to me in different ways, and that I’d like to start giving back to more deliberately. From my team at work, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, to those people that I haven’t talked to yet, to those I may never talk to.
In security we talk about resilience all the time. Defense in depth. Assume breach. Build for recovery, not just prevention. It’s good advice. It also means something completely different when you’ve sat on the side of a road watching your kids cry over animals that won their classes a few hours earlier.
The “Occasional Cattle Reference” in the tagline isn’t completely a joke. It’s also a reminder that the person writing these posts, is a whole person, with a whole life, and that sometimes the most important lessons about the work come from somewhere that has nothing to do with it.
Community is what makes the work, and life, possible. Inside your organization and outside it. In the show ring and in the SOC. Both of those things are true at the same time.
In a world like we find ourselves in most days, I think that matters more right now than it ever has.
To everyone who has showed up for me, for my teams, and to those who showed up for my family last summer: thank you. You know who you are. So do we.
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