About
ost of what I do, when I trace it back far enough, comes from being a life-long student. Curious by default, restless when I'm not learning something. The teaching part shows up because, honestly, I can't help it. Once I figure something out the next thing I want to do is explain it to whoever will listen.
That's the short version. The longer one starts with curiosity and a diagnosis.
For most of my life I felt like I was on a different wavelength. In my late 30s, I decided to get an official diagnosis. The paperwork didn't really tell me anything new, but it gave me a name to what I had been experiencing all along. I saw peers stick to what they loved for weeks, months, years...all the while I existed in a constant state of discovery, hyper-focus, burn-out, repeat.
What the diagnosis didn't do was fix anything. Hyperfocus until I'd learned a thing, then drift. Hyperfocus on the next thing, then drift again. Same loop, repeating forever. The skill I'd thought I lacked turned out not to be a skill at all, just a different brain, and once I could see that I could stop believing it was a personal moral failing.
The pattern
Alright, with that out of the way, let's talk a little about my professional life and how I got here. I started in web hosting back when "cloud" was the new kid on the block. I was on the customer support side of things. Linux, troubleshooting, and sorting out the mess when somebody else's web dev didn't know what they were doing.
After a few years of that I got bored and decided to pivot to security. So I slid into compliance work, gap analyses mostly, before getting pulled into building a company's entire security program more or less single-handed. For about five years I was, essentially, "the security team," which was as ambitious and exhausting as that probably sounds.
When that ran its course I moved over to the commercial side of cybersecurity, and the last few years have been in customer success in the pentesting world. First with traditional pentesting-as-a-service, now with autonomous pentesting. The two are in the same ball-park, but the later is just much cooler.
Each shift looked, from the outside, like restlessness. From the inside it was always the same loop. Learn the thing until I understood it well enough to explain it to somebody else. Get bored. Find the next thing that's related and interesting. The job titles changed every few years. The pattern didn't.
Writing & teaching
Underneath all of that, two things always held true.
I've been writing since high school, in some form or another. Not for any particular reason at first, angst mostly. Then I found I just enjoyed using words creatively. The long-form attempt is more recent. Echoes of the Void, the fantasy series I'm currently working on, is the first thing I've made that's bigger than I am and demands I sit with it for years instead of hours. I don't know if I've got the patience to actually finish it. I guess we will see.
Teaching is the other one I keep coming back to. Every job I've held has had some form of teaching in it somewhere, even when teaching wasn't part of the job description. The new hire who had questions. The customer who needed help. The coworker who needed somebody to draw it out for them. I'm not sure "teaching" is even the right word for it. "Trying to make the next person's day a little easier" is closer, and the impulse is the same whether you call it teaching or anything else.
How I work now
And then there's AI, which has been quietly becoming the thing my brain keeps coming back to for the last couple of years. Not as the next job title. More like the obsession I can't quite put down. Convenient timing, given my brain was in the market for an operating system anyway.
I don't really use AI the way many do. I use it as the organization layer my brain has wanted my whole life and never had the budget for. The chaos of an ADHD brain isn't a lack of thought. It's an excess of it, branching faster than any one mind can keep track of, and the trick has always been catching the thoughts before they disappear, then finding them again later when I actually have time for them.
For me, that currently looks like a personal AI collaborator I call Coglin and an Obsidian vault that does most of the organizing behind the scenes. Notes, projects, fictional characters, half-written essays, ideas that won't make sense for another year or two. Everything in one place, everything linked, everything available to the AI as context whenever I need it. It's not the silver-bullet version of AI that gets sold on LinkedIn, it's the much less exciting version where, for the first time in my life, I have a system that actually fits the kind of brain I was born with.
Where the work lives
So this site is the place where the work itself gets a little room to breathe.
The two doors on the home page point at the actual pieces. The creative side, including Velruneth, photography, and anything else I'm making with my hands or a keyboard, lives at the creates side of the site. Writing about technology and AI and whatever else I have opinions about lives at talks side of the house. This page is just the part that points back at the person all of it traces to.
If you want to reach me, the easiest way is contact@ericteichmiller.com. I'm always game for a conversation, especially about the stuff I haven't quite figured out yet.
That's the long version · back to home