Cybersecurity Specialist // ISSO // RMF // Macon, GA
I spent four years locking down Air Force systems. Off the clock I'm flipping houses, running a homelab, playing table tennis, and running cameras on Sunday mornings. This is where I write about all of it.
$ whoami --verbose
I'm a security engineer who likes knowing how things actually work. I started as a computer scientist at Robins AFB keeping SQL databases with millions of records clean and locked down. I then moved into the ISSO seat, where I wrote ATO packages, applied STIGs, and coordinated with three Air Force departments and Raytheon to get missile-test support systems authorized.
The best part of the job was making a complicated system secure and understandable. I once briefed a four-star general on how our support systems ran. I bring the same approach to everything else here: freelance websites for small businesses, a self-hosted server in my house, and the old house I tore down to the studs and rebuilt.
I grew up bilingual in English and Mandarin. I'll take anyone on at a ping-pong table.
$ tail -n 3 ~/career.log
$ ls -l ~/skills/
$ ls -t ~/blog/
When I left the base in late 2025 I bought a house that needed almost everything. I started it the way I'd start an ATO package: walk the whole property, write down every finding, and rank them by risk. Water and structure came first, then electrical and plumbing. Paint and fixtures came last.
The overlap with security work is bigger than I expected. You can't patch your way out of a bad foundation, and every hidden problem behind drywall costs you twice. Budgets and timelines slip the same way they do on a big IT project, so documentation saved me more than once.
I'll post the before-and-after photos and a full breakdown of the budget and timeline here soon.
I built a home server so I could own my data and have a place to break things safely. It runs my self-hosted services and a growing set of AI automations that handle the repetitive parts of my week, the same way my Python and PowerShell scripts used to save my old team 14 hours a week.
Security habits came home with me. The box has least-privilege accounts, nothing exposed that doesn't need to be, and I watch what's on the network with Wireshark when something looks off. It's a small zero-trust lab I control end to end.
Coming up: a full walkthrough of the hardware, the services, and the automations that turned out to be worth it.
Most Sunday mornings I'm with the production volunteers at Ingleside Baptist Church. Live production is a lot like operations work. There's a checklist before the service, a plan for when things go wrong, and no second take once it starts.
I like it because the work is for something bigger than me, and because the team is great. It's also a good reminder that technology is there to serve people. When production is done well, nobody notices it.
Table tennis is my favorite way to get out of my own head. The rallies are too fast to overthink, so you have to trust your preparation and read what's in front of you. Good incident response works the same way.
Mandarin is the other thing I keep sharp. Being bilingual changed how I communicate: I think about who's listening and translate ideas to fit them. I use that skill whenever I explain a technical system to a non-technical room.
If you're in Middle Georgia and want a game, reach out.
$ ssh guest@andrewhsu
Try whoami, skills, clearance, pingpong, or sudo hire andrew.
$ cat ~/.contact