Welcome Azshaya to the Kin!

[Ryrin]

 

 

Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself? 
 

In the mean time .....

 

 

[Arie]

Azshaya!! Welcome to the old-one's club! ?

[Ryrin]

Lol. I’m literally “The Eldest” but we love to have all ages here.

[Arie]

I think I'm always happy to see people who were here longer than 10+ years ago. XD 

 

>.>

[Azshaya]

Awwwww, this is really unexpected, thank you! :)

 

What about me...I've never been good at this stuff...lets see. I'm a returning face with a brand new identity, which is fitting because of how much has changed since I was last here (for the better).

 

I work in Cybersecurity which is really interesting because it's always changing and you get to learn something new every week. In my spare time I mostly like to keep up with what's going on in my field, and I'm doing some extra learning so I can get certifications that will help me get to where I wanna go! I don't read as much as I used to, but I'm currently reading Adam Savage's book Every Tool's a Hammer. It's pretty interesting, he talks about things he's learn over the years and how you can apply this to building stuff, as well as life in general.

 

Those drinks and snacks look delightful, thank you again!

[Ryrin]

Cyber Security! Awesome! My son is a software engineer/developer.  
 

Would we recognize your previous identity? 
 

I’m a retired social worker, married with two adult sons. The other son is a Fire Lt.  age 23! 

 

I love animals especially dogs, birds, and cats.

 

Hobbies include reading, swimming, and painting.

 

Do you have any hobbies?

[LadyWordsmith]

Welcome, Azshaya! 

That's cool! My sibling is in cyber-security. My mother wrote systems and system analysis software for telecommunications companies from 1972 until she retired a couple of years ago, so different field, but we all come by our tech savvy from family. Of course she tells me lately she's been coding some new projects of her own just for the fun of it because she enjoys it. 

I'm a high school English teacher (virtual for over 6 years now because the school I'm teaching for is virtual, and loving not having a commute, or having to discipline kids in the classroom. It's all one-on-one and small group online and so much easier to focus on the actual material). 

 

[Azshaya]

17 hours ago, Ryrin said:

Cyber Security! Awesome! My son is a software engineer/developer.  
 

Would we recognize your previous identity? 
 

I’m a retired social worker, married with two adult sons. The other son is a Fire Lt.  age 23! 

 

I love animals especially dogs, birds, and cats.

 

Hobbies include reading, swimming, and painting.

 

Do you have any hobbies?

Software Engineers always amaze me. Believe it or not you don't need to be amazing at coding to be in cybersecurity, and coding has never been my strong suit, so people who can do it well are like magicians to me. Something I tell my boyfriend pretty often.

 

My hobbies these days are mostly focused around learning for my certification courses, but I also play computer games...started that when I was 12 and never really looked back :D

 

And that's awesome for your other some, really impressive! :)

 

14 hours ago, LadyWordsmith said:

Welcome, Azshaya! 

That's cool! My sibling is in cyber-security. My mother wrote systems and system analysis software for telecommunications companies from 1972 until she retired a couple of years ago, so different field, but we all come by our tech savvy from family. Of course she tells me lately she's been coding some new projects of her own just for the fun of it because she enjoys it. 

I'm a high school English teacher (virtual for over 6 years now because the school I'm teaching for is virtual, and loving not having a commute, or having to discipline kids in the classroom. It's all one-on-one and small group online and so much easier to focus on the actual material). 

Thank you!

 

Your mother is pretty amazing. I always love hearing about the early days of computer systems programming because so much of it was still being figured out back there, it was all new! It's even more amazing that your mother was doing it. Tech to this day is still very male dominated, and was even more so in the 1970's, so it's always inspiring to see the women who laid the foundation for the rest of us :)

 

So I guess teaching virtually for years before didn't really cause things to change much for you when the world locked down huh?

[LadyWordsmith]

3 hours ago, Azshaya said:

Your mother is pretty amazing. I always love hearing about the early days of computer systems programming because so much of it was still being figured out back there, it was all new! It's even more amazing that your mother was doing it. Tech to this day is still very male dominated, and was even more so in the 1970's, so it's always inspiring to see the women who laid the foundation for the rest of us ?

 

So I guess teaching virtually for years before didn't really cause things to change much for you when the world locked down huh?

I agree, my mother is amazing. ? She was also telecommuting for almost all of it (my folks moved from California to DC in 1978... and then to Oklahoma in 2002. My Mom worked from home with a computer and phone -and business internal 'IM chat' way before the rest of us- the entire time after they moved). I learned 'all' about how to work full time at a salary job, and raise kids while home, from her. 

It's funny but almost all the programmers I know in her age range are women. I keep running into them. I know she worked with men and had male coworkers, but it seemed much more even-handed when she talks about work. Maybe the telecommunications field had more women programmers than other fields using them? Kind of like the huge number of female 'computers' that worked at NASA. 

It didn't change as much as it did for everyone else, no, but it's still been a huge shift. For one thing, all our students are still dealing with the same in-home stresses and traumas as everyone else's students. If they or their parents get sick... a lot of my students (since I have Juniors, and a smattering of Seniors and super-seniors (students who are 'coming back' to finish HS when they may be up to 21)) work part or full time jobs while doing school. Some of them are parents themselves. 

Also our enrollment EXPLODED this year with a lot of families looking for better alternatives than what their local districts were offering. But a lot of these are folks who would never have considered online otherwise, so the entire culture and way of doing things is maybe not the 1st choice best-practice choice for their individual student. Though of course we do everything we can to help them acclimate to online and distance learning. It also meant hiring a bunch of new teachers we had to teach how to do what we do as well (on fairly short notice since a lot of people enrolled only after their local districts announced plans right before school started in August and September). 

And it's really weird not to have in-person stuff this year. Even in a normal year we have field trips all over the state (multiple a month) to give our students the opportunity to meet and socialize and 'get out.' And we usually have a few in-person teacher meetings during the year. But we didn't get to do that this year. We've been learning how this virtual field trip things works along with everyone else. ?

[JamesBrown]

Welcome, Azshaya. I'm a cloud administrator myself. I enjoy scripting, but my skills aren't enough to call myself a software engineer by any means.

 

I've been in IT for over twenty years, and I've looked at cybersecurity as a career path off an d on. But I always get depressed at how vulnerable our networks are that I just want to turn off my computer and hide under the bedcovers. So my props to anyone who can maintain that vigilance. (Same reason I could never be a police officer.)

[Azshaya]

15 hours ago, JamesBrown said:

Welcome, Azshaya. I'm a cloud administrator myself. I enjoy scripting, but my skills aren't enough to call myself a software engineer by any means.

 

I've been in IT for over twenty years, and I've looked at cybersecurity as a career path off an d on. But I always get depressed at how vulnerable our networks are that I just want to turn off my computer and hide under the bedcovers. So my props to anyone who can maintain that vigilance. (Same reason I could never be a police officer.)

Oh that's awesome! Cloud Security is actually the focus of my Certs right now. I'm still pretty new to the industry so I'm working on the Azure Security Engineer course right now, eventually going towards their Administrative and Architecture courses. I'd love to be a security engineer or architect some day :)

 

Cybersecurity can definitely be like that sometimes, no matter what you do there will always be a fault that people will exploit...but that's also what keeps me motivated.  I can't stop everything but I can do my best to make it harder on those who want to hack me :D

[LilyElizabeth]

Welcome to the Kin, Azshaya. 

[Ryrin]

We have lots of people who are tech savvy!

 

We use my son and team viewer to fix any of our home tech problems.

 

Lady, it is interesting how our whole culture of work and school has changed. I wonder what will stay and what will go back to the way it was.