Profile
Programming Instructor transitioning into cybersecurity, with foundations in Python, data engineering, and Linux. Currently pursuing a B.S. in Cyberdefense at UNDEF and the Cisco Junior Cybersecurity Analyst path. I maintain a public technical atlas applying formal pedagogical methods (Ausubel, Sweller, Matuschak) to cybersecurity concepts, and publish technical write-ups on my blog. Particular interest in GRC, threat intelligence, and security awareness — roles where teaching, structured documentation, and knowledge organization translate directly into operational value.
Experience
Programming Instructor — Silicon Misiones
March 2023 - May 2025 · Remote · Cohorts of ~50 students with prior programming experience
Designed and delivered a 24-class hands-on curriculum across three progressive modules, taught live through interactive Google Colab notebooks where theory and exercises lived inline — authored with explicit pedagogical scaffolding (advance organizers, worked examples, retrieval prompts, error taxonomies).
- Python foundations: types and control flow, pattern matching, OOP and design patterns, error handling, modules, and file I/O — applied to ETL exercises on real-world datasets.
- Intermediate / advanced Python: generators and lazy evaluation, comprehensions, closures and decorators (timer, debug, memoize), regex-driven validation and extraction, ETL pipelines built around
@dataclassandmatch/case. - Data Science & AI: NumPy vectorization, REST API integration with caching, Pandas data wrangling, data visualization with Seaborn/matplotlib, SQL and SQLAlchemy (Core/ORM), applied transfer learning via Hugging Face pipelines, and a closing module on exploratory data analysis (EDA).
Independent Projects & Public Work
Atlas — public knowledge graph for cybersecurity
Public atlas of cybersecurity concepts as atomic, interlinked nodes — definitions, prerequisites, common misconceptions, and retrieval prompts. The idea grew out of atomic-brain, a private agentic workflow I use for academic notes; now applied in public, with nodes seeded from my blog write-ups.
Technical blog
Long-form write-ups on cybersecurity, learning systems, and developer tooling — connecting hands-on labs and academic material to atomic concepts in the atlas.
Privacy-first B2B/B2C SaaS — in active development
Building a platform with event-driven architecture — high-concurrency workflows, real-time geospatial processing, and strict data segregation by design.
Education & Active Training
- B.S. in Cyberdefense — UNDEF · 2026 – 2029, in progress
- Junior Cybersecurity Analyst — Cisco Networking Academy · in progress
- Online courses: CS50 (Harvard), The Missing Semester (MIT), Python Programming MOOC (Helsinki)
Technical Skills
| Category | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Core | Python, SQL, Bash, Linux (Fedora daily driver), Git |
| Documentation & technical writing | Markdown, MDX, Astro, LaTeX & TikZ, D3 force-directed graphs |
| Data analysis & reporting | Pandas, NumPy, SQLAlchemy, Seaborn, matplotlib |
| AI / NLP tooling | Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, Claude Agent SDK, RAG (applied in atomic-brain pipelines) |
| Knowledge engineering | Obsidian, atomic notes (Zettelkasten), spaced retrieval, agentic content pipelines |
| Cybersecurity (learning) | MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF, ISO 27001 fundamentals, Cisco Networking Academy |
| Spoken languages | Spanish (native), English (B2), Portuguese (basic) |
Contact
- Email: matias@zapf.dev
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zapf