What a better way to kickstart 2024 than looking back at 2023. In a nutshell, the second part of 2023 was a watershed moment. Not only have I started blogging more regularly but I have made some conscious decisions about the future of this blog.
The first one is that all these years, I was not really opinionated. That was a decision fearing that I could alienate potential segments of the audience, essentially playing it as safe as I could. However, this year I had my watershed moment. I have blogged about this moment – essentially it a round table where I had the dubious honor to be the sole engineer between CxOs, when I pointed out that the recommended solutions for a dissolutioning and disillusioned workforce ain’t worth a hill of beans, no matter how well the powerpoint was presented, I managed to get the best audience engagement I have ever had in my entire life – everyone was against me. I still maintain the positions stated in the relevant blog post but this got me thinking, hard.
This blog is a part of my professional identity. While it is (and always will be) explicitly decoupled from past and present employers, folks interested in learning more about me are likely to come across it. So, do you try to keep it lukewarm and friendly towards anyone or you voice your opinion, with the danger of alienating a certain segment of the potential audience. “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly” Mahatma Gandhi once said. As stated before, I do like Germany, my current country of residence. I will leave political views aside and stick to my industry view: German IT industry and mass adoption severely lags behind the US – in the domain of cyber security this is more than exasperated. There are multiple reasons for this, which I will not list here (a lot of them are warranting their own blog post) but the outcome is the same: A lot of folks are afraid to rock the boat and talk about this Mammoth-in-the-Room situation (two cliches in the same sentence? My Written Composition tutors would be proud, I guess. And yeah, elephant does not even comes close to the severity of this topic).
I do run the risk of course being deemed undesirable and controversial on whatever arbitrary basis the reader operates under and I am fine with this. You see, I do research things before posting them – to the best of my ability and available time. This does not mean I am always right though, I deliberately step outside my comfort zone so I am bound to have a few misses here and there. I sure do welcome feedback and I expect my viewpoints to be challenged (and given what I write about information security in Germany, please DO PROVE ME WRONG, it will make my day). I also take into consideration that opinions of an individual change over time, so I might as well look back at some point in time and say something along the lines “whoa, that was a real weak analysis outcome I wrote back in 2023” – this is also fine, as it signifies personal growth. Overall, offering my opinion to the public serves to an extent as my professional Litmus test – if you deem me controversial and undesirable, I have some news for you, most likely I don’t rate your organizational operational parameters that highly myself.
Another conscious decision is the following. As you can guess from the title of this article – even if it is the only article you have seen so far – I am big on music. Besides my day job, I am a recording musician. Music tech is a field that I find really, really exciting. These days, way more things are done in music with the aid of computers and embedded systems than not. Is music tech exciting? It sure is! Do I want to write about it? Yes! Do I have the capacity to write about it, given my time commitments? Probably not. In any case, I do not want to dilute the messages I am trying to convey from this blog, so even if I do, unless it has some security connection, this content will live elsewhere.
Athanasios Kostopoulos 