How I Wrote a SOC-Grade Endpoint Investigation Playbook Without Being a Security Engineer

My father worked in IT for over thirty years, and growing up around that shaped how I thought about computers. The earliest memory I have is sitting in my father's lap as he does something on his computer. One of the oldest photos I have is of me sitting on a chair in front of a computer. I grew up idolizing him. I switched to Linux when I was 12, by myself. I taught myself scripting, picked up programming basics, and spent more time in a terminal than most adults I knew. I have memories of sitting on the roof at 13 with my laptop, trying to crack my neighbor's WiFi with aircrack-ng (they were aware of my endeavors). However, growing up in a politically volatile neighborhood (Lyari) also made me politically aware and literate from a young age. With that, I developed an interest in political science and philosophy. I sat my A levels in economics and sociology, and I did not look back. For the next few years, the technical side of my life became just a habit rather than a professional direction. Then I realized I do not have to choose one or the other. I can carry on doing both. Today, I am an academic and technical editor. The social sciences gave me the writing skills: reading long blocks of dense theory, explaining abstract concepts in plain language, writing long analytical essays. And I understand technical concepts well enough to work with them seriously. I thought of synthesizing both. When I started building a technical writing portfolio, cybersecurity documentation felt like a natural place to go. Not because I had operational experience, but because I had grown up adjacent to that world. I understood the culture, the tooling, and the mindset, even if I had never worked a SOC shift. I knew I wanted to cover security documentation. Security teams produce some of the most consequential written work in any organization, and most of it is poorly structured, inconsistently formatted, or written for the person who already knows the answer rather than the person who