Interviews, Rusty Tools, and a Help Desk Simulator
It's been a busy stretch, so this post is a check-in on the three things eating most of my time right now: the job search, the security toolkit I'm writing in Rust, and a new project that turns help desk tickets into a game backed by a real cloud tenant.
The job search
The search is picking up momentum. I've had two interviews recently, and one of them went genuinely well — it's the role I'm most excited about, the kind of spot that would put me right in the middle of the security and support work I've been building toward. I should hear back on one of them sometime next week, so I'm trying to channel the waiting-around energy into shipping projects instead of refreshing my inbox.
Interviewing while you're still learning is a strange thing. You spend a lot of time worried about the gaps, but what I keep finding is that the home lab and the projects give me something concrete to talk about. It's a lot easier to explain how DHCP or an auth log works when you've actually stood the thing up and watched it break.
Rusty Tools
The biggest ongoing project is Rusty Tools — a growing toolkit of six small security tools I'm building from scratch in Rust. Right now it covers a port scanner, live traffic analysis, a decoy-service honeypot, an auth log analyzer, a file integrity monitor, and a security config auditor. Each one runs from the command line, and I also built a point-and-click web dashboard on top so you don't have to memorize flags to use them.
Picking Rust was deliberate. I wanted a language that forces you to think about memory and error handling instead of letting you paper over it, and building security tooling in it means I'm learning how these techniques actually work at the packet-and-syscall level rather than just running someone else's binary. The honeypot and the log analyzer in particular have taught me a ton about what "suspicious" really looks like in the data — which is exactly the muscle a SOC role leans on. There's a full writeup on the site, and the code lives on GitHub.
Help Desk Simulator
The newest thing I've built is a Help Desk Simulator — a gamified ticketing system that connects directly to a Microsoft Entra tenant. Instead of practicing on fake, throwaway data, the simulator hands you tickets that map to real identity and access tasks — the reset-this, unlock-that, fix-the-group-membership work that fills a help desk queue — and you resolve them against an actual tenant.
Turning it into a game was the fun part. Wiring a ticket system up to Entra meant getting comfortable with app registrations, permissions, and the Graph API, and thinking carefully about scoping so the "game" can only touch what it's supposed to. It ended up being a great forcing function for learning cloud identity properly: you can't fake your way through a ticket when the tenant is the source of truth. I'm treating it as a training tool for myself, but it's also a pretty direct answer to the "what have you actually done with Entra?" interview question.
What's next
Between now and hearing back on those interviews, the plan is to keep both projects moving — more tools in the Rust kit, more ticket scenarios in the simulator — and to keep writing it down here as I go. If any of this is useful to someone else walking the same help-desk-to-SOC path, even better. More soon.