Troy Childs

I’m Troy Childs.

I’m a U.S. Army veteran with more than two decades of hands-on experience working with electronics, communications systems, troubleshooting, maintenance, and technical problem-solving in environments where “figure it out” was often part of the job.

My career did not begin in cybersecurity.

It began with equipment that had to work.

Over the years, that meant diagnosing failures, tracing problems back to their source, learning unfamiliar systems, documenting what mattered, and working independently when there wasn't always someone standing beside me with the answer. The technology has changed throughout my career, but the process has remained familiar:

Understand the system. Establish what normal looks like. Find what changed. Fix what you can. Document what you learned.

That mindset is what brought me here.

Why Cybersecurity?

I didn't get into cybersecurity because I wanted to collect certifications or memorize attack names.

What interests me is the problem.

A system exists in a particular state. Something changes. Maybe it is malicious. Maybe it is broken. Maybe it is just behaving in a way nobody expected.

The job is to understand what happened.

That means learning how systems communicate, establishing baselines, creating visibility, recognizing anomalies, investigating evidence, and making better decisions after the fact.

That process feels familiar to me.

Cybersecurity is a new technical domain, but problem-solving isn't.

What This Is

Budget. Build. Break. is my attempt to document the transition honestly.

This is not a collection of screenshots from tools I installed and never touched again. It is an evolving technical portfolio built around constrained environments, practical infrastructure, security monitoring, controlled failure, investigation, and iteration.

Each environment begins with a question:

What can I realistically build with this budget, this hardware, and these constraints?

Then I build it.

I document the architecture, establish a baseline, harden what I can, generate activity against the environment, investigate what the telemetry tells me, and close the loop with documentation and an after-action review.

Then the next environment is built better because of what I learned from the last one.

The goal isn't to create a perfect network.

The goal is to understand what happens when it isn't.

How I Work

I learn best by getting my hands on the system.

That means breaking things.

Sometimes intentionally.

Sometimes by accident.

Both are educational.

I'm interested in understanding the relationship between infrastructure, endpoints, networking, logging, detection, investigation, and the people responsible for keeping all of it running.

I also believe there is value in being honest about the difference between:

Something I've studied. Something I've configured. Something I've actually tested. Something I can explain and defend.

Those are not the same thing.

This portfolio is built to close the distance between them.

Where I'm Going

My current focus is building practical experience across infrastructure, networking, security monitoring, detection, and incident investigation.

I'm adding certifications along the way, but the certifications are not the destination.

The goal is capability.

I want to be able to have an honest conversation about something I built, something I broke, what I observed, what I missed, how I investigated it, and what I changed afterward.

So that's what you'll find here.

Not a finished cybersecurity expert.

Not someone pretending twenty years of previous technical experience automatically makes me a senior security engineer.

Just a technical professional bringing a long history of troubleshooting and systems work into a new field—and documenting the process of earning the next chapter.

Budget it. Build it. Break it. Understand it. Build the next one better.

Welcome to the lab.