// About

// Who Am I?

I am James, a lifelong tech enthusiast. I started building computers in 1999 and got my first gig at 14 making Flash ads in exchange for apparel. That sparked a decade of web development before I transitioned into a tech generalist. I have spent time as an advanced repair agent, sys admin, cloud architect, and security consultant for major US companies.

Today, my focus is on my family and running a security and ops team. I have traded in building domain controllers and threat hunting rogue IPs for leadership, but I still pour my free time into personal projects. Right now, that means building the Zero Day Collective, a site hosted on GitHub Pages using Astro where I blog about famous hacks. My AI minions handle the rest of the busywork (muhahaha).

We are living in an incredibly exciting era for technology. The current landscape is more exhilarating than my first website, app, or blockchain project. Tech is fun again. I have always believed this industry is about passion rather than money, and if you follow the work, the money will follow you. I look forward to passing this mindset down to my kids. Knowing them, they will likely just do the exact opposite.

// What Is This Place?

Zero Day Collective is an archive of culturally significant hack stories told with narrative depth. Not dry incident reports. Not vendor whitepapers. Actual stories, the kind where you understand who the people were, what they wanted, how they pulled it off, and why it mattered. The technical detail is real, but so is the human story behind it. Every entry is meant to be readable by a curious non-technical person and still satisfying for someone who lives in a terminal.

I built this because I love hacker history and I was frustrated that so much of it lives in scattered forum archives, out-of-print books, and YouTube rabbit holes. These stories deserve a proper home, documented carefully, cross-referenced, and presented in a way that respects both the technical reality and the cultural weight of what happened. The Carbanak heist, Kevin Mitnick's FBI chase, GhostNet, these aren't just security incidents. They're chapters in the actual history of the internet.

It's also, honestly, a playground. I use this site to experiment with AI agents as content collaborators: researching stories, drafting entries, building out the glossary and media pages. It's the most interesting workflow I've found for this kind of structured long-form content, and I'm still figuring out where the edges are.

And yes, the site is deliberately a little corny. The terminal aesthetic, the green-on-black, the // comment headings. It's intentional. I grew up on 80s and 90s hacker culture: BBS boards, War Games, Hackers (the movie), 2600 magazine. That era had an ethos of curiosity over profit that I think got largely buried under VC money and compliance frameworks. The aesthetic is a reminder of why I got into this in the first place. If it makes you feel like you're about to type HACK THE PLANET into a keyboard, then it's working exactly as intended.