Ethical Hacking progress
I'm done. I've managed to complete the Pluralsight Ethical Hacking Path. This has been a significant investment of my time over the last three months - but I've completed it dead on target.
Courses I’ve completed in the last week:
Ethical Hacking: Penetration Testing - No learning check available
So what have I learnt from the path;
I've learnt a lot more than I expected. Some things I think I would have been happier not knowing, but there is some great stuff in those courses - I'd really recommend it to any IT teams. As mentioned before, I've no intention of taking the Certified Ethical Hacking exams, but a deeper understanding of the motivations, attack vectors and tools has been great to expand my knowledge.
There are further courses on Pluralsight regarding Hacking tools - but I'm happy with my current level. I think it's time to focus my studies onto another subject ....
www.red-folder.com design
I'm not a designer.
Something that should be fairly obvious with the current look and feel of my www.red-folder.com website. I'm really not happy with a number of the pages...
(That homepage has now been changed … fingers crossed it’s a bit better)
So, I'm going to spend the next month or so improving my design skills - and in doing so updated the look and feed for www.red-folder.com.
There are a few courses on Pluralsight for design and a CSS path that I go through (more on this next week). Generally I'm comfortable with CSS - but I can certainly be better.
In addition, I've also started to look at Bootstrap Studio - a tool for designing out Boostrap based sites. After an initial play, I do like the tool - although any designs I produce then need to be moved into Visual Studio to use with Asp.net MVC. So definitely seems useful for quick design mock ups, but may not be practical for long term development. I'll see how I get on with it - but at the moment, I'd recommend taking a look if you’re a developer wanting help laying out a page.
Contractor Process
So there are a few things I do post getting a contract in place.
I'll update LinkedIn and CVs which my availability (in this case I'm contracted up to 30th June). I find this useful to give agencies and clients a clear idea of my availability.
I'll then upload those CVs to the job boards (which can generate some overly excited phone calls from agencies that trigger calls from CV activity). I'll switch off my email alerts as well.
I'll generally also contact some key agencies ... especially if I've been mid-conversation when the contract is agreed.
And that's pretty much about it - until next time.