Hi 👋, I'm Gagan.
I'm a software engineer and current MS Computer Software Engineering student at Northeastern University in Boston, with about three years of industry experience and a home lab that refuses to stay finished. These days my focus is cloud infrastructure and cyber security, which is a polite way of saying I like building systems and then figuring out how they break.
Some background: I spent two and a half years at Accenture building React frontends and wiring threat intelligence into SIEM platforms like Splunk and Azure Sentinel, so my security interest comes from actually sitting with the tooling, not just reading about it. Before that I was a UX designer, which is why I get equally upset about insecure systems and misaligned buttons. I hold CompTIA Security+ and A+, and I have a growing habit of entering AI hackathons and coming home with second place trophies (Responza at BU Questrom, RoboSight at Hack-Nation, both built on very little sleep).
Fun fact: everything you're reading right now is self-hosted. This blog is a Dockerized Ghost instance behind a Traefik reverse proxy on an Oracle Cloud Free Tier server, sharing space with my media stack and whatever experiment I'm running this month. That server is my favorite classroom, and the source of half the posts here.
What to expect from this blog
Cyber security. Practical notes on threats, tools, hardening, and the occasional bug hunt. Less "top 10 tips", more "here is what actually happened when I tried it."
Self-hosting and server management. Docker, Traefik, reverse proxies, backups, and keeping a free-tier server alive under real use. If you want to run your own things, you'll find working configs and honest mistakes here.
Debugging war stories. Sometimes a three-hour bug has a thirty-second fix. I write those down so at least one of us learns from it.
Design and weird little niche subjects. I still care about UI/UX, and sometimes a post is just about something odd I found interesting. That's allowed. It's my blog.
I'm currently looking for cloud and cyber security roles, so if you're hiring or just want to compare notes, say hi. The formal version of me lives at https://gagancm.github.io, and the comments are open on every post.
Don't hesitate to share your thoughts.