2026.04.17
☕☕ 2 min read

About

G’day 👋

I’m Ricardo — most people in this corner of the internet just call me Ric. I live in Perth, Western Australia, which in global-industry time-zone terms means I’m almost always the first person awake when there’s an incident and almost always the last person still typing when everyone in EMEA goes to bed. Worth it for the sunsets.

Day job

OT Tech Leader / Cyber Technical Authority at one of Australia’s largest energy companies. In practice that means I spend a lot of my time on the interesting seam between IT security (the world of CIOs, SaaS tenants, MFA fatigue) and OT security (the world of PLCs, SCADA, historians, and engineers who still remember what a loop check is).

My brief is roughly:

  • Set the technical direction for how control systems stay safe, resilient, and operable.
  • Translate between engineers and security teams — two tribes that agree on almost everything and argue about almost everything.
  • Occasionally write procedures; occasionally rewrite them when reality votes differently.
  • Speak at conferences when people are kind enough to ask.

Credentials I quote when HR needs a dropdown filled in

  • BE — Electrical, Communications & Control (the original foundation)
  • MSc — Cybersecurity, Edith Cowan University
  • CISSP / CSSP / GIAC GRID / GIAC GICSP — mostly because the OT world still likes a good acronym

Off the clock

I collect small, slightly pointless engineering projects the way other people collect vinyl. Some recent ones:

  • A homelab that is comically over-specified for a single household, currently orchestrated with Terraform and Ansible from a Debian LXC on a Proxmox node that talks to a Kemp load-balancer which talks to a Raspberry Pi cluster which serves this very blog.
  • A toy programming language called breeze (see the post) — written to teach myself how compilers actually work, not to start a movement.
  • An ongoing low-grade obsession with Wireshark dissectors for weird industrial protocols.

Languages

English and Portuguese (bilingual), plus working Spanish. If you need a four-way translation on the fly between Iberian networking vendors, I’m probably your guy.

Reaching out

Professional stuff → LinkedIn.

Code stuff → GitHub.

Everything else → [email protected]. I read it all, even if the reply arrives three time-zones later than it should.

This blog runs on Hugo, nginx, and three Raspberry Pis. The backend rsync-syncs every 15 minutes. If something looks stale, that’s probably why.