...who's Jack LaFond?
Hi! I'm Jack. I've had a chance to dabble in many trades (get it?) over the years, but at my core, I've always had a passion for tinkering. I recently graduated with a degree in Cybersecurity from the University of Tampa (and liked it so much, I decided to stick around for my MBA!)
Over the last decade, I've been learning how to build, break, and bother digital systems. That's led to some pretty cool stories:
I'm currently working at Bureau Veritas Cybersecurity as a Security Engineer, primarily focused on penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.
My passion for cybersecurity and computer science keeps me busy - but more recently, I've been loving full stack development with Next.js, spending time reversing applications to extract data from private APIs, tinkering with my homelab, maintaining my seemingly never-ending collection of side projects, and always breaking things every chance I get.
I've been fortunate enough to gain a multitude of skills over the years through various job experiences. If you would like to learn more about my professional experience, you can learn more on my resume.
I've always loved how I can meet friends from all corners of the world through the internet. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat! My Discord is @lafond - I'm currently offline.
Other than that, I'm scattered around the internet. You can find me here:
...no seriously, who's Jack LaFond?
(above average) tall human with a love for the digital world. my start in cybersecurity (and tinkering with code in general) was because i wanted to hack pokemon go during the 2016 craze. after getting banned a few times, i ended up on Discord and was introduced to Python scripting - which then led me to the fantastic world of Discord bots.
i spent quite a few years developing Discord bots, scaling them to hundreds of thousands of users (and many of them paying)! here, i was able to see the world from a different perspective. it showed me that the internet truly had no borders, and there were few barriers to connecting with incredibly talented people.
i spent the next few years of my life in the iOS jailbreaking community. there, i developed an obsession with pushing the limits of a system. it was the first real opportunity I had to discover the boundaries of such a powerful device, and then figuring out how to get around them. not only did this give me a deep love of the Apple ecosystem, but also put me into the mindset of "how can i break this?" - a very useful tool to have in cybersecurity.
somewhere along the way (right around the 2021 pandemic), i started to develop web apps. my good friend Alistair spent far too much time teaching me TypeScript, and then React, and it wasn't long before I was scaling up full-stack applications. I was able to build some really cool projects, including stardew.app, which is used by tens of thousands of people monthly.
i've gotten to wear a lot of hats over the years. i've been a content creator, a marketing intern (twice!), a developer, a developer advocate, an incident response analyst, and now a security engineer.
throughout this journey I've been able to meet some of the most talented people across the globe. my parents always told me that strangers on the internet weren't to be trusted, but I've found that to be far from the truth (as with most things in life, it's a spectrum). i've made some of my best friends on the internet, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn from them every single day.
i pride myself in being a hobbyist. i've done just about everything you can think of - i did content creation for many years, learned how to design, source and produce t-shirts, dabbled in cryptocurrency & NFTs, configured many Minecraft servers, invested too much time into my homelab, and the list goes on.
outside of work, i'm a huge music nerd. i also spend a sizeable amount of time tinkering with my homelab, playing video games, taking amateur photos, and writing code. i hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about me! i'd love to get to know you! feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat!
that's all I've got for now!