Engineering Chaos: Where Security, Leadership, and Neurodiversity Collide

In tech, we love our illusions of control. We write postmortems about “unexpected behavior” and create dashboards that promise total visibility. Reality has other plans.

The Failed Experiment That Started It All

A month ago, I announced plans to open-source some security tools. Like most tech initiatives, it started with my compulsive need to tinker with things. The reality? I had zero interest in maintaining them or dealing with the “works on my machine” issues. There’s nothing worse than a “dead” project. As I got ready to release “Riptide,” I noticed a major error — one I neither wanted to fix nor deal with anymore. So I decided to keep my failures to myself.

Meanwhile, I was juggling a few side projects because I can’t sit still. In stepping back from this self-imposed chaos, I noticed a pattern: everything I touched revolved around chaos. Maybe being the common denominator wasn’t the problem — maybe it was the solution. Why not lean into it?

Why “Engineering Chaos”?

And so Engineering Chaos was born — a blog about finding peace with “good enough” while navigating the space between success and chaos.

The merging of these side projects resulted in the combination of three worlds that shouldn’t work together, but somehow do:

My Love for Security Operations

Security operations exists in a perpetual state of beautiful disaster. While Hollywood shows dramatic scenes of furious typing and enhance-enhance-enhance, the reality is much messier. Queries take forever, things are constantly breaking, and the logs for the latest zero-day aren’t in your SIEM. Just when you think you have it all together, Crowdstrike or Microsoft remind you that you don’t.

Then there’s the weekly report — that special form of corporate theater where you copy-paste the same data between fourteen different documents, massage it into three different formats, and present it in a five-minute meeting where nobody remembers what you said last week. But don’t worry, you’ll do it all again next week. And the week after that. And the week after that…

Meanwhile, the data you actually need is spread across a dozen “single sources of truth” — either buried on someone’s desktop or hiding in a shared site you somehow still don’t have access to. But there’s something compelling about this chaos, about finding patterns in this mess. That’s what keeps me here.

The Technical Translation Challenge

You know that scene in Office Space where Tom explains his job as taking the requirements from the customers to the engineers? “I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to!” Technical leadership is exactly like that, except both sides are speaking different languages entirely.

On one side, you have engineers speaking in the languages of features and functions, and executives focused on shareholder value and ROI. It’s a complex balance — you’re never technical enough for the tech crew and always too “in the weeds” for the higher ups.

I’ve spent years in the middle, translating complex technical realities into business speak, and I’ve learned a few things worth sharing. And yes, I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

A Different Way of Thinking

Stepping back from the snark for a moment — I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism nearly three decades ago. If you’re neurodivergent, you probably know that feeling when you move into a new place and every device is desperately searching for a Wi-Fi signal that hasn’t been set up yet? That’s how our brains work — constantly scanning, searching for connections, processing everything all at once.

Somehow, I’ve managed to ride this chaos all the way to the executive suite. It wasn’t despite being neurodivergent, or because of it — it was just about finding ways to make it work. The path from technical roles to C-suite wasn’t exactly straightforward, but it was possible. And that’s something I wish more people in our community knew.

Over the years, through private conversations, I’ve connected with others facing similar challenges. Some are trying to navigate corporate ladders that weren’t built for minds like ours. Others are parents just trying to get their kids through the next semester. While I don’t have all the answers (sorry), I’ve learned some things along the way that have helped me reach the executive level — and it’s time to share those lessons. Not because I’m special, but because nobody should have to figure this out alone.

Where We’re Heading

This space is for everyone trying to engineer their way through chaos:

• Security teams wondering why their “enterprise-grade” solution just became an enterprise-grade problem
• Technical leaders, struggling to play the corporate translator and why AI won’t fix it.
• Anyone trying to navigate ADHD/autism in a world that wasn’t built for our kind of thinking

Looking Forward

Every system tends toward chaos. Instead of pretending otherwise, I hope you’ll join me in the world where control is elusive and the best way to plan is to focus on changing the effect, not the outcome.