Built by hand, usually on a shoestring. I'd rather understand why a thing works than just get it working.
Who's behind the cheese
Before the lab, there was the jobsite. Twenty years in construction — certified welder, OSHA 30, USACE-certified quality manager (CQM), CDL-A. I learned to show up, own the problem, and not walk off till it’s fixed. Security’s the same discipline pointed at a new kind of system: read the logs, find the fault, build it back stronger. Same boots, different dirt.
Forbidden Cheese started as a learning project — a way to teach myself C#, Python, Linux, networking, and web development by actually shipping things instead of just reading about them. It's still mostly that: a place to learn in public.
I've spent years working with my hands. Now I'm in school for an A.A.S. in Cybersecurity & Networking, and I run a home lab where I host real services for my family and teach myself the security side by practicing on hardware I own.
Most of what you'll see here was built on a tight budget with a lot of stubbornness. None of it is my "finest work" — it's my first work, and I'm proud of it for that. I'm still learning. That's the whole point.
The stack
The work
Grouped by what they are. Every one taught me something I didn't know when I started it.
Self-hosted infrastructure
A private family cloud — our own alternative to Google Drive. 2TB of storage, per-user space, a shared family folder, custom theming, and a real auto-renewing HTTPS certificate. Runs on a tiny always-on mini PC I set up from scratch.
A self-hosted private social network for family — a tiny, private social hub we fully own. Generous upload limits (I can share a 4GB video and it streams fine), messaging, photos, files. Reverse-proxied with automatic HTTPS.
A fully local, private AI setup on my always-on mini PC — Ollama running the models with an Open WebUI chat front-end, no cloud and no data leaving the house. I've also built the retrieval (RAG) pipeline and I'm now filling its knowledge base for cybersecurity study.
A Plex media hub for the household — 200+ ad-free movies and a couple dozen shows, all from our own DVD/Blu-ray rips, digitized and optimized with HandBrake. Streams to TVs, phones, and browsers.
Desktop tools
A Windows app that reads documents aloud with an offline neural voice (Piper TTS) — loads TXT, MD, DOCX, and PDF, and can export a full reading to a WAV file. Python, packaged with a real installer. One of my more genuinely useful builds.
A small CTF/security multi-tool for Windows, all under one roof: encode/decode (Base64, hex, ROT13, binary & more), hash identification, a strings extractor, and an EXIF/metadata dumper. Built while studying for NCL — the kind of utility I kept wishing I had in one window.
A desktop OSINT terminal for U.S. public companies. Name a ticker and it assembles SEC filings, recent news, and the encyclopedia entry into one briefing — three public sources pulled in parallel, on your own machine. No account, no tracking.
Games & interactive
A 3D hardcore wrestling game — a decades-old dream, loosely inspired by the pageantry and mayhem of '90s pro wrestling. A big solo undertaking in Unity. Rough and ambitious; targeting a first playable in 2027.
A 2D mobile dungeon crawler in Unity — pixel-art combat, three enemy types, and a boss every 7 levels that escalates in strength, speed, and size. My second Android game and a real step up. Early, but playable.
My first Android game — touch-controlled, ducks fixing robots, with hazards and bosses to survive. It taught me a ton about UI and touch input (mostly by getting them wrong first). Downloadable and playable.
A web memory-matching game I made for my mom — match each of her kids (and the pet) as youths to their grown-up selves. Three difficulty levels, best-time tracking, and a rotating quote. A little family gift that also taught me web apps.
My very first "finished product" — a small HTML/GitHub experiment that's hard to explain and better to just click. I keep it up as a marker of where I started.
Learning the security side
A practice range I built at home to teach myself the offensive and defensive basics — safely, on hardware I own — plus how I measure my progress against the rest of the country.
I learn by doing, so instead of only reading about attacks, I set up a small lab where I play both sides: one machine as the attacker (Kali), one as the target I'm defending. Every exercise runs entirely on my own equipment, on my own network.
I structure the practice as numbered “operations” — each has a goal, the steps I took, and a defensive review, so I actually learn how to spot and stop the thing I just tried, not only how to run it.
I also carry it into the real world: a portable Kali laptop for on-the-go practice and wardriving, so the skills aren't only theoretical.
Every season I compete in NCL's national Individual Game against thousands of students across the country. I'm not at the top of the board — but I've climbed from Platinum into Diamond, season over season. The rankings below come straight from my Cyber Skyline record — the full achievement history, individual and team, is shown just below.
My complete Cyber Skyline record — Individual & Team, every season:
Strongest categories across seasons: Cryptography, Password Cracking, Scanning & Reconnaissance, Enumeration & Exploitation, Log Analysis. Working toward my CEH certification alongside my degree.
On the workbench
The honest in-progress list — things that work partway, or are next up.
Filling my local AI's retrieval pipeline with a curated cybersecurity reference library, so it can answer from trusted sources instead of guessing.
Grinding toward a first playable build — the long-term passion project, chipped at between school and everything else.
Working toward the Certified Ethical Hacker cert alongside my A.A.S., and continuing to compete each NCL season.
Practicing wardriving and passive recon with the portable Kali kit — turning classroom concepts into real, hands-on repetitions.
Applying what I learn to my own network first: certificates, least exposure, and treating my own setup as the first thing to secure.
Writing up what breaks and how I fixed it. The mistakes are half the value — and someone else in my shoes might need the notes.