The First Blog of My Summer as the Summer is Drawing to a Close
At the start of my summer, I had big plans. One of them was to get this blog out there into the world so that I have something to look back on right about now. Unfortunately like many projects started with great ambitions, reality tends interfere pretty hard. So what took up all my time this summer, here’s 5 things took up a good amount of the summer for me.
1. Classes
One of the things I’ve been up to was taking Data structures at a community college. It’s been fairly engaging so far, not too diffcult but still challenging enough that I feel like I’m learning things (I also kinda get memes from shirts like “Linked Lists don’t exist”). I’ve also been mostly watching random defcon talks as I am still working up my commitmitt meter to more structured classes like Getting Started with Packet Decoding with Chris Brenton and some other courses that I hope will help me on my way to getting a Security+ certification.
2. Research
This summer was also the third summer I decided to dive into research. This time I wanted to be more focused on cybersecurity so this summer I’ve been working under PHD student Muhammad Hassan to build devices simulating Matter biomedical devices so that we can analyze the potential vulnerabilities in these sorts of devices. It’s been a great learning experience as I have never worked on any projects directly involving Javascript nor Node.js.
3. Cars
Being into motorsports is not only a financially consuming hobby, it is also a time consuming one as anyone who calls themselves a Car Enthusiast would tell you. This summer I decided to sink my time into the hobby and I got a mildly beat up Pontiac Solstice. The more I learn about this car, the more I relate to it’s many quirks. Hopefully soon I’ll post a nice write up about what I have done on it or plan to work on. Anyways here’s a picture of a Kappa (IYKYK).
4. Arch
I think that this experience was honestly one of the more interesting CS related things I’ve done and I’ll probably publish a more detailed write up in the future about this but yea to keep this short, it has been weird, annoying fun, educational and painful. I’m still in the process of building a riced out GRUB page and setting up Hyperland but hopefully once I do, I’ll do a proper write up on ricing Arch. Also I should post a short writeup for how to get jekyll properly setup on Arch, it is pretty simple but it can be annoying to figure out what issues can hold up the building and running this site locally. Also in case it wasn’t clear I use Arch BTW.
5. Reading
This is something I keep telling myself every summer I would pickup again. I remember how before I graduated highschool I used to spend an hour or two each day just reading, whether it was actual books or SCP articles. However overtime that habit fell to the wayside and now I want to build that up again. I recently started small with BlueBeard by Kurt Vonnegut. I hope posting this will make me feel more accountable and that I’ll post a review of it soon. I also really want to start a letterbox account so that I can actually keep track of what I watch instead of always scrolling to this pinned note on my notes app.
Anyways, this has been 5 things I’ve been up to this summer. Hopefully I can share a more in-depth blog for the many things I’ve been up to.