Contact
- Get my public GPG key.
- Email me at nanodano@devdungeon.com.
- Reach me on XMPP at nanodano@devdungeon.com.
- Find me on the DevDungeon Discord server, where my username is
NanoDano#9417.
Introduction
Hello and welcome to my corner of the internet, DevDungeon. My name is John Daniel Leon. The primary topics here are related programming, cybersecurity, software freedom, and electronics.. I started this blog in 2012 with the goal of writing tutorials to reinforce my own knowledge and share knowledge with others. It has come a long way over the years. Now I have the blog, a wiki, a YouTube channel, a book, courses, multiple software services and the Virtual Hackerspace for people to join and become a member, and a load of projects online.
My background
I started programming in the 1990's by teaching myself QBASIC and DOS Batch scripting. Later, I grew in to Pascal and C++. Along the way I learned web technologies like Microsoft FrontPage, IIS, PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Around the same time I started programming, I began learning violin and soon after that guitar as well. I currently own and enjoy playing an electric violin, electric guitar, and electric piano. I have also owned many other instruments including bass guitars, mandolins, various drums, harmonicas, and an erhu. I have performed in large and small venues in symphonies, choirs, rock bands, and solo. I like playing all kinds of music ranging from classical, blues and jazz, to heavy metal. I particularly enjoy improvising, whether it is solo with a loop pedal or jamming with some friends.
Music and programming have always been two of my primary interests. I have written a post on Similarities Between Music and Programming. I attended university originally for music composition with a focus on classical guitar. I wanted to be the next John Williams or Nubuo Uematsu. I quickly switched to computer science as I saw it as a much more practical and useful degree. I graduated from University of North Texas with a B.S. in Computer Science.
In my professional career, I first spent several years as a web developer working with ASP.NET, PHP, Drupal, CakePHP, Wordpress, and Linux at a company named ISITE Design (now Connective DX). After working there, I worked as a software engineer at SoftLayer (now IBM Cloud) working on enterprise level web applications. I then moved in to an Application Security Architect role within IBM Cloud where my focus became application security, security engineering, automation, and training. I have spent a lot of time reviewing code, automating and integrating security infrastructure, training developers to write secure code, training security engineers to program, assessing applications for vulnerabiltiies, and assisting incident response and penetration testing teams. After working for IBM as an Application Security Architect, my focus shifted to security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR). I began working for Palo Alto Networks as a SOAR Architect and Customer Success Architect for the Demisto/Cortex XSOAR product. After a year in that role I became a manager to lead all of the U.S. Customer Success Architects.
These days I still enjoy programming in a variety of programming languages. My current focus is creating education material to teach more people about programming, cybersecurity, and philosophy.
Noteworthy projects
I have worked on many projects over the years and it is difficult to pick just a few to highlight here, but here are some things I am proud of:
- DevDungeon Virtual Hackerspace, membership for access to DevDungeon infrastructure like chat, email, git, web, mainframe ssh
- DevDungeon Blog, hundreds of tutorials on programming and security topics.
- DevDungeon YouTube channel, hundreds of hours of live streams and videos.
- Security with Go, a book published by Packt Publishing about using Go for security and penetration testing.
- Cathy Chat Bot (Discord)
- DevDungeon GitHub Projects, dozens of freedom software projects written in a variety of programming languages.
- DevDungeon Discord Community, join hundreds of other programming and security enthusiasts.
- Uppora site checker - A service that alerts you if your website goes down.
- DevNix Linux Distribution, a Fedora Remix aimed at developers. Nobody else uses it, but it was quite an endeavor.
Donate
I have put years of work in to this website, community, and freedom software. If you would like to support this endeavor financially, you can use the PayPal donation button below, or through my StreamLabs donation page that also accepts cryptocurrency.