Hello There!
G'day Legends!
Congratulations! You've stumbled upon my own little slice of the interwebs so I figure you're due at least a cursory introduction to who I am, what I do, what's the purpose here and with any luck you'll find something interesting!
I'm Chris Edwards (aka Korthal), an Identity and Access Management Engineer with a passion for automation (primarily PowerShell), efficient system design and probably most importantly, a massive Dragonball Z nerd. I've spent the better part of 20 years working in the IT industry; from small boutique, to large enterprise and a solid chunk of consultancy work thrown in for good measure. I primarily live and breathe the Microsoft ecosystem with Entra ID, Azure and Azure DevOps but the broader experience runs deep across infrastructure, Identity Governance Administration, Privileged Access Management and a lot of accumulated knowledge of typical business systems and process (ITIL, Agile methodology) and a healthy dose of scar tissue from two decades of doing this. My DiSC profile calls me a Perfectionist and honestly, I'm not going to argue with that.
So why Korthcore and why now? I've owned this domain since my early 20s and never really did much with it. A brief Laravel web dev stint was one usecase, but primarily it's existed because I wanted to keep the name until I found a good use for it, and with the increased use of LLMs and Agentic systems I've got a new skill to learn and figured I'd use this as a platform to discuss a whole bunch of fun stuff. Now whilst you'll never hear me claim to be an absolute expert, lately I've found an enjoyment in knowledge sharing the things I do know with those interested, and the hope that broader discussions come out of it. After all, the best way to learn something is to have your viewpoint challenged by a different way of thinking from outside sources, so I figure this place is as good as any to get that feedback and continue to improve myself and others!
Anyone who knows me knows I tend to be a pretty big stickler for rules, process and governance and it's probably why I enjoy doing the work that I do, because a large part of that, especially in IAM consultancy work, is the integration of those standards and guardrails in all kinds of different environments, with not a single environment ever quite the same. Something I came to notice throughout my years, and especially during my consulting time, was that whilst every business, big or small, will do certain things differently, when it comes to the actual tech stack in use, for the most part a lot of the work involves the same kinds of steps. An audit here, a report there, a technical design doc that follows a nearly identical structure due to the same foundational systems and best practices they're built on.
Up until very recently, I had absolutely no interest in LLMs or AI solutions. Like, at all. I'd give them a shot, be thoroughly unimpressed and move on with my life. But more and more, each and every day, AI tooling is being embedded into the same business systems I work in every day, and it is quickly becoming apparent that managing those tools is going to land squarely in IAM territory. I mean, what are agents if not identities? That led me to do what I always tend to do when I'm wanting to learn something new, throw myself in the deep end and see what's what and how it is likely to apply in my day-to-day work.
So I decided to nuke my domain and build it up again from scratch using modern tools like Maester and the Microsoft Zero Trust Assessment to enact, document and troubleshoot my way through a full zero to hero style build journey, using AI (primarily Claude Code) tools to determine good usage and governance where possible. The primary goal was purely to see if I could. To take two decades of doing this work properly, by hand, with process and governance baked in from the start, and see what it looks like when you apply that same standard to AI-assisted delivery via the use and guidance of modern toolsets. My own fresh tenant and domain as the test environment.
Now I'll note this emphatically:
Every post here in this blog is not AI generated, at all.
These posts will be all hand crafted by yours truly and it's going to stay that way because I enjoy doing it myself (a trend you're likely to see throughout future posts...), so expect typos galore! Many posts here will cover a few different projects and fun little learnings I've gathered along the way. The Korthcore Compendium if you will. Some of it will cover AI usage and builds within the tenancy, others will cover learnings, failings, greenfield builds and integration patterns for different fun things across the broader IAM ecosystem.
My hope is to be able to put my thoughts to paper and share with y'all in the hopes it's both interesting and a potential opportunity for learning. I appreciate you taking the time to read this, if you want my preference I feel this site looks best in Dark Mode and I hope you found my little fun easter eggs hidden among the nonsense :)