Westerhof

Hello, 2025!

As is tradition in the Netherlands, a new year means new ‘goede voornemens’. Now, I think it’s a silly custom as most people can’t flip a switch in their mind and change their core habits just because it’s January. But what I do think is worthwhile is to look ahead and see what the objectives for the next 12 months are.

In the past I was a more fanatic planner than I am now. I’d make per-month goals, filling my Google Calendar with tasks and todo’s timeboxed per hour for every day, all copied over from a Trello board used to define little sprints and epics. Getting older, I for sure do less of that. Keeping track of all that fat is such a massive overhead. It’s time to cut back.

This year, next to being a good friend, son and citizen, I’m simply going to outline some broad objectes that I want to work towards.

Do more with AI

I’m rather skeptical about LLM (Large Language Models) superpowers. In my first draft, I went on a tangent about them, but I don’t want this post to have multiple paragraphs describing my thoughts about the technology or multi-agent system ‘hype’. Perhaps another another time.

LLMs are a tool for me. Using them has given me a lot of help writing content whenever ‘halucinations’ are not an issue. A useful sparring partner for writing Dungeons and Dragon encounters, social media descriptions and filler quest dialogue for mods. My goals is to make the usage more structural and set up my own system and hardware for it.

Upgrading my hardware was on my to-do list already. My 2080’s not as fast as I’d like for rendering in Blender and playing new video games, so adding ‘running inference on consumer-grade GPUs’ shouldn’t be a big hit to the wish list - as self-hosted is better. I look forward to sharing any builds and experience about this.

Release a game

Another goal that I’ve had for many years is to publish a game for people to enjoy. I’ve had some general ideas, but before I make something that I think I can be truely proud of, I want to get experience under my belt with easier projects that are still fun to make.

As such, I’m planning to clone some quick and dirty games, with the expected return of interest to be in the deep red. But that’s okay - it’s the experience of creating, sharing and publishing that I want to have. I’ll be blogging about this frequently as well.

Getting certified

When I look at my resume, I see that it is strong in work experience. But I want to fortiy it some more by adding certifications worthwhile in both my carreer and in my interests.

To do that, I intend on doing another attempt at OSCP in the first half of the year. My previous attempt before COVID, I wasn’t able to get enough points to pass the exam. Needless to say, it’s been a mark lingering in the back of my mind ever since! Gaining this cert will be proof of my pentesting skills and the 24 hour proctured exam is an enjoyable experience that you cond bond over with other people.

For the later half of the year, I want to focus on getting CISSP. With my 7 years of experience, I think it will be a good step-up, a sign of seniority in my field. While from the stories I have heard, it’s mostly about Information Security as compared to CyberSecurity. That does have me worried about me being able to keep interest in the course, so if I later decide not to go for CISSP, I’m going to try OSED or Burp Academy instead.

Blog more

My last bullet point is that I’m eager to do more writing for the blog this year. I find the writing experience to be very enjoyable, specially when it flows. It makes me eager to keep up my online record, here on my little corner of the internet. So I intend to write at least a monthly update for any projects or skills I’m learning to upload here.

And then, of course, when all is said and done, we can have another look in 2026 to see how far we’ve come. Hope to see you more along the way!

Changelog

• 2025/01/06 - Revised and uploaded
• 2025/01/05 - Written