Projects & Labs

Hands-on identity and cloud labs, and the rules I build them by.

Lab Rules of Engagement

SC-300 Azure Lab

Five rules to follow when labbing Microsoft SC-300.

PowerShell first, GUI last.

Provision users, assign roles, and check access through PowerShell. Use the portal only to verify what your script did, or when a task has no scriptable path.

Document everything.

Every session gets a write-up: what you built, the commands you ran, what broke, and how you fixed it. Future you, and future recruiters, should be able to follow it cold.

Every lab ends in a repeatable artifact.

A script or Terraform file. If you can't redeploy it from scratch tomorrow, it didn't count.

Break it before you trust it.

After building a control, try to get around it. Sign in from a blocked location, test gaps in your Conditional Access, and look for over-permissioned roles. Knowing where policies fail is what separates engineers from admins.

Tie every lab to a business or compliance driver.

Open each write-up with one line naming the risk it reduces or the control it satisfies, like "Enforces MFA for privileged roles (NIST 800-53 IA-2)." That's the language of IAM engineering and GRC.