Well – that’s it.
That’s the end of 2023, and the end of my 365 days of blogs challenge.
When I decided to write a post every day for the entire year, I had no idea if I would keep it up or not – I hoped that I would keep it going, but a lot can happen in a year – many things could have occurred in the last 365 days which either delayed me writing something, or made me forget to do a post completely – but it didn’t. I made it to the end of the year without missing a single day!
I managed my time effectively, and if I knew I would have a busy week at work, or for the weeks I went on holiday, I wrote some posts in advance and set a schedule for those posts to be automatically published, but in the main, I wrote each post on the day it was set live. I am typically at my desk for 07:30, so it gives me a good couple of hours before my day job starts to get my posts written – I’ve always found that I work best in the morning anyway, so that fitted well with my schedule.
Why did I decide to do this?
There were a number of reasons I decided to set myself this year-long challenge – one was that I just love the topic of cyber security, another was that I also enjoy writing. However I think the main reason was that when I started in this industry I said to myself that if I ever woke up in the morning not wanting to go to work, it would be time to move on to something different.
Well that was almost 30 years ago now, and that day has not yet arrived, however I was finding myself getting a little bored with the whole industry, so this challenge was a way for me to try to re-invigorate my love of the world I’ve lived in for the last 3 decades or so.
And I believe it has worked.
I’ve rediscovered my thirst for knowledge in “all things cyber”, but more importantly, I’ve reinvigorated my passion for passing on my knowledge of the industry to others.
As an educator, its my job to enthuse about topics to my students – If I don’t do that, I’m doing them a disservice. Even if I don’t find a particular topic the most interesting thing in the class, I have to make my students believe that it is, otherwise they have wasted their money attending my class. If I come across as being bored by a topic, my students will be bored by it too, so I have to enthuse, I have to be passionate.
Over the last couple of years or so, I’ve found that I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I could be, I wasn’t as engaged as I could be, I wasn’t as passionate about my industry as I should be – and I needed to fix that.
By writing these posts – I could have simply copied and pasted articles from other, similar websites, but what I wanted to do was write an article that not only showed the news, but also some of the “hows” and “whys” of the story. So rather than just write about a post that talked about a ransomware attack, I wanted to research and write about how the attack happened, what technologies were abused, and then explain how those technologies were abused.
I wanted to write my posts in a clear way that explained the complex world of cyber in a non-complex way – hopefully to educate others about such things.
Looking at my website statistics, I’ve had people from all over the world read my posts – most viewers are from the UK, but I’ve had people from Russia, China, Thailand, the US, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, and Canada.
I didn’t particularly write these posts for others – it was for my own purposes I wrote them, but If I’ve helped 1 person learn a bit more about cyber security, then that makes me very happy.
The world of IT is a complex place, the world of cyber security is even more complex, but these systems impact our everyday lives in a multitude of ways – when threat actors target them they can cause huge ramifications which can cost billions to put right, but also cost lives.
The more I can play a part in educating people to be safer with their IT world, the better the world can be.
And that’s what gets me up in the morning!
So, that’s it….
For all those who dropped in to read the odd post – thank you, I hope you learned something.
Will I carry on writing posts?
Most likely – yes – but maybe not one every day.
For now – I’ll wish you all a “Happy New Year” and hope that the new year brings you all you could wish for.
I’m going to chill with my family, my 2 new puppies, and a glass or two of whiskey, whilst I think of the 1st post for 2024!
