Elijah Hawk

Software Engineer / Solutions Architect / Cybersecurity Enthusiast

Welcome to my site!

1 minute read

So here it is, my first blog post. You know, it would have been a heck of a lot easier, and more straightforward to simply use Medium or GitHub Pages as a way to write about, well, ‘stuff’. However, having become an AWS Solutions Architect - Associate, I wouldn’t be leveraging it to its fullest if I didn’t exercise the skills that I picked up. Not to mention it kind of helps to show others that I know how to do things with code, you just don’t get that kind of experience by using Medium.

Another reason why I wanted to self-host my blog is to be in near complete control of my content. Granted, that’s not going to stop web scrapers from scraping, but if that’s what I was worried about then why manage a blog at all?

I am hoping to use this blog as a way to communicate and describe my experiences diving deeper into cybersecurity studies. I began studying for the OSCP at the beginning of 2023, and time and time again, one way to solidify knowledge gained from studying Kali Linux and working on virtual machine challenges is to craft write-ups of said virtual machines.

You may also be wondering about the name of this site, to put it simply, it’s my name in Japanese. While I’d like to dedicate a lengthier blog post describing the origins of why I chose this domain, the simplest explanation is that while undergoing my Solutions Architect studies, I learned that S3 buckets can’t start with xn--, this piqued my curiosity and I shortly learned that that string is a prefix for ‘punycode’. One thing led to another, and I settled on a Japenese variant of my name. Why S3 buckets can’t be pre-fixed with this string is still a mystery to me, and in fact, it actually prevented me from hosting this website using S3 directly, which is why I went down the route of leveraging Jekyll (which GitHub pages uses) in combination with AWS Amplify.

I’ll probaby dedicate two more posts one that discusses the different options that existed for standing up my own site, the other will go into my first time using Jekyll and AWS Amplify (it wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be).

If you’ve read this far down, bravo! And welcome to my blog! I hope you like it!

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