Why I’m Building a New Cybersecurity Homelab

Five Years Later!

Five years ago, I was just a curious college freshman with a few spare computer parts, a lot of Google searches, and a dream of breaking into cybersecurity.

That spark led me to build my very first homelab in a small apartment bedroom. No mentors, no structured guidance, just curiosity and trial-and-error.

That project changed everything. It was the first time I saw what was really happening under the hood: how hosts behaved, how networks communicated, how virtual machines could mimic production environments.

My entire career in incident response, detection engineering, threat hunting, and cloud security traces back to that moment.

Now, half a decade later, I’m starting over.

But this time, I’m building with real-world experience behind me, more intention, and a vision.

Dec 2020 → 18-year-old me - working as a Cybersecurity Intern & full-time college sophomore at the time.

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Why Start Over?

The first lab was raw curiosity.

Plugging things together, watching packets fly, and trying to make sense of it all.

That’s exactly what I needed at the time. But I’ve grown. I’m no longer the kid trying to figure out what a SIEM even is. I’m a security engineer at Amazon who’s lived in the trenches of incident response, adversary detection, and cloud security.

And with that growth comes new questions:

• How can I push my homelab into its next evolution?

• How can I design my homelab to build and test the new skills I want to develop at this stage of my career?

• How can my new homelab help me learn new skills?

This time, the goal is not just tinkering. I’m designing a home Security Operations Center (SOC) where I can experiment, prototype, and learn new skills in public.

Jan 2021 → For a while, I thought I was going to become a network (security) engineer, so here I am in 2021, diving into network security for Cisco routers and switches. Spoiler: I did not become a network security engineer.

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About Me

If you're new here, I'm Day, a Cybersecurity Engineer at Amazon. With five years in cybersecurity, my experience covers Detection Engineering, Cloud Security, Incident Response, Threat Hunting, and most recently, Threat Intelligence.

Before Amazon, I worked at Datadog as a cloud threat detection engineer, where I researched cloud threats and built detections for various cloud providers and SaaS applications.

I've worked my way up from SOC analyst roles, investigating everything from endpoint threats to cloud-based abuse, so I know exactly what it takes to break into this field.

I started, just like many of you, learning from scratch, asking questions, and figuring it out one step at a time. And now, I'm here to help you do the same.

I was able to break into cybersecurity as early as my freshman year of college. I’ve secured several jobs and interviews before earning my college degree, and I’ve helped thousands of people achieve the same success on my various content channels and in my Discord Community.

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The New Blueprint