Building a Sandbox
I spend my days up to my elbows in infrastructure. Between teaching cybersecurity and IT at Laramie County Community College and running my MSP, Rolling Hills Technology, I live in a world of Proxmox clusters, Django backends, and networking gear. But a few years ago, sitting in my classroom in Cheyenne, I hit a wall: you can’t truly learn IT or cybersecurity just by reading about it.
You have to get your hands dirty. You need to deploy, configure, and occasionally completely break a system to understand how it works. That realization was the spark for WyoCyberRange.
Where It Started: Out of Necessity
The whole project started because my students needed a safe place to break things. I was already writing my own course materials—I’ve written over 15 textbooks at this point, including IT Automation for the Professional—but the curriculum was only half the battle. We needed a digital proving ground.
I’ve always believed in making the abstract tangible. Back in 2025, I even built and presented a mobile fire station model at an NSF conference just to give students a physical, visual representation of an SQL injection attack. WyoCyberRange was the digital equivalent of that philosophy. I built the LabTech learning platform to be the engine behind it—a dedicated, hands-on virtual lab environment where students could run real operating systems, configure real networks, and run real exploits without bringing down the LCCC campus network.
By the end of 2025, the project had grown enough that I completely redesigned LabTech into a full Content Management System. It stopped being just a quick tool for my Monday-through-Thursday classes and started becoming a comprehensive educational ecosystem.
The Evolution: Open Education and Real-World Tech
The platform is built on the same gritty, real-world tech I rely on in my home labs and in the field. It’s powered by the things I tinker with every day—Proxmox VE, Python, Django, Nginx, and Tailwind CSS.
As I kept building, my focus shifted toward Open Educational Resources (OER). I realized that the barrier to entry for quality, hands-on cybersecurity training was just too high for a lot of people. Earlier this spring, I gave a presentation at the WY-OER conference titled "From Expertise to Ecosystem: Building a Multi-Sensory OER with AI." That talk was essentially the manifesto for what WyoCyberRange was becoming. It wasn't just a lab anymore; it was an open ecosystem meant to bridge the gap between textbook theory and actual keyboard time.
Where We Are Now: Opening the Gates
Today, WyoCyberRange is more than just a college resource; it’s a community platform. It ties directly into the culture I try to build locally, whether we are organizing TekCon at the college or packing up a group of students to head out to DEF CON in Vegas.
Because of that community growth, I recently decided it was time to take the next big step. Just a few days ago, on July 16, I officially announced the release of the LabTech software platform as freeware. I updated our terms of service, put out the press release, and opened the doors. WyoCyberRange is now available for anyone who wants to learn, build, and break things safely.
The motto for my upcoming retail supply shop is "Nerds with Power Tools," and honestly, that ethos perfectly captures the heart of WyoCyberRange. We aren't just reading about tech—we are handing the next generation of IT professionals the tools they need to build the infrastructure of tomorrow, one virtual machine at a time.