I teach cybersecurity at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and I just started a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus in Instructional Design and Educational Technology. I also built and run Open Cyber Range, the platform my courses use for their hands-on labs. My advisor suggested I write publicly as I go, and I loved the idea right away. So much doctoral work lives its whole life in drafts and committee meetings, and I'd rather share the good parts while they're still in motion.
Most of what I do leaves an artifact behind: a lab that resets cleanly, a course module that finally lands with students, a range topology that survives twenty people hitting it at once. What the artifacts never carry is the reasoning behind them. The constraint I was working around. The version that failed first. The tradeoff I took on purpose and would take again. Six months later I can't always reconstruct my own decisions, which tells me they were worth writing down while they were fresh.
So that's what lands here.
Build logs, mostly. What got built, what broke, and what I learned when it broke. The busted version is usually the better story, so it stays in.
Design notes, when the teaching side is what's interesting. Why an exercise is sequenced the way it is, where the environment does the instructing instead of me, and how I work out whether a design actually did its job.
Research notes as the program picks up. Reading, methods, and the questions I haven't answered yet. I'd rather think out loud while I'm still figuring something out than wait until I've tidied all the uncertainty away.
Posts written for somebody who wasn't in the room with me. I'll name the constraint before the solution, show you the version that failed, and stay honest about what I still haven't worked out.
If you teach this stuff, build ranges, or you're working through a program of your own, I'd love to hear how you go about it. There's a contact page, and I do read everything.
More soon.
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