About me

Who am I

My name is Jonah Albert, current cybersecurity student at Penn State University. I am very interested in cyber forensics and physical penetration testing, also known as legal trespassing. Even though I am a cybersecurity student, I have a lot of side projects as a web developer. This is something I hope to continue after school, and maybe even make a career out of it.

IT Professional

I wouldn't exactly call myself an IT professional; I'm more of an IT experimentalist. I push technology past its limits to find the limits. Trial and error with little planning is my favorite kind of programming. More often that not I am rebooting at least one computer because of a fatal error or infinite loop.

Interests

It is interesting to see how people interact with technology, especially the ones that think they are terrible with computers. More often than not, I end up as IT support for many of my friends. I don't mind that, but I have had people ask me for tech support because I told them my major is cybersecurity.

"Can you hack Lionpath for me?"

No
I have been around technology for most of my life, and I have become pretty confident with all types of computers. Raspberry Pis are always fun to use for projects. I have multiple Raspberry Pi projects under my belt, with more on the way. Programming is a very time consuming hobby, and one that I love.

Future Career

As mentioned before, I would like to make web development a future career of mine. Not professionally though; I am not much of a professional developer. I do not enjoy creating as my main job. I will create programs for fun, but being stuck in a development cycle does not sound appealing to me. As a main source of income, I would like to find work in the cybersecurity world, working with digital forensics or physical penetration testing. These both would lead to a life of consulting, but I am hopeful I can find a full time job in digital and cyber forensics.

Web development

I should mention my website that I hope to make a career out of. It is called Tags for Talking. A mental health chat website with physical tags, I first thought of the idea for a competition in high school. Our initial prototype took first place at the competition in 2019, and I've been the sole developer on the project since then. You could say I am a full stack developer, but that feels like cheating. I don't know the first thing about design, so I am more of a backend developer masquerading as a full stack unicorn.

Outside the Classroom

Aside from my packed school schedule, I enjoy being outside. You can find me among the tall trees, getting lost with a camera in my hand. I am also a certified scuba diver with a camera in my hand. Wherever I go, a camera is not too far away. I also spend a majority of my time in clubs, mainly as a member of THON.

IST 210 Lab 1

As this blog is for a class, here is a linked Youtube video on the rest of the assignment. Enjoy my terrible improv on Sparked Science and a quick rundown of the fork between MySQL and MariaDB.