Year in Review: 2023
Starting this year, I plan on writing yearly recaps where I take the time to reflect on notable events and developments in my life that I am comfortable sharing publicly. Along with reflection, I want to establish realistic goals for the upcoming year. These recaps year over year will serve as a reminder of my progress and change over many years, as well as a form of accountability for my goals.
Table of Contents
Reflection
2023 has been an eventful year marked by significant changes in multiple areas of my life. I feel that the word “eventful” is mostly used in a positive manner. While my developments this year were a net positive, I did have my fair share of negative events, stressors, and things I would have liked to avoid. I mention this so anyone reading understands I am not perfect and I do have my own challenges like everyone else.
Education
I graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. Independent of my degree, I had the opportunity to assist in teaching a class, as well as participate in research, both with a focus on cybersecurity. I also held a leadership role in a club I care about. It’s difficult for me to top graduating as an achievement for the year, but there are some conclusions related to education I’ve come to that I plan to take with me past college. Most of these were opinions I held before ending school, and life after college has started to validate them.
- The desire to learn is inherent to who I am, something I enjoy, and an essential part of my profession regardless of any formal curriculum.
- I still want to continue some sort of formal education whether it’s through trainings, certifications, classes, or another degree. As time passes and I reflect on my experiences with my undergraduate education, graduate school is becoming less of an interest to me.
- The time I dedicated to school had a negative impact on my mental health that went beyond what I thought in the moment. Since finishing college, I’ve been happier, healthier, and more confident in my technical abilities. I don’t really wish to feel how I felt during school again, and learning outside of another formal degree might be better for my sanity and overall success.
Professional
This July, I started my first full-time job in cybersecurity, and my work so far has been interesting in a good way. My employer has given me the opportunity to participate in interesting security engagements, I’ve done a lot more mobile security, and I’ve had a much larger role in hands-on pentesting engagements. Using some of the security skills I’ve learned on my own outside of school has been very rewarding. Overall I am doing well here, and I hope to continue progressing in 2024.
Personal
In July, I moved across the country to follow a job opportunity. As you can imagine this had a large influence on my day-to-day life and has already started to shift some of my values, desires, and perspectives. Overall this decision has been a significant net positive for me. Living far from family and friends forced me to take on more independence than I did in college, and has helped me gain more direct and explicit control over my life that I retroactively realize I was somewhat avoidant of. I regularly do spontaneous things just because I want to, and the increased free time without school combined with the requirement that I make my own decisions has made me motivated and excited to spend my free time on activities that make me happy.
Health
Through my late teens and early adult life, I fluctuated in weight between overweight and healthy multiple times. While I have been in a healthy state for the last few years, I feel this year I started to grasp healthy and sustainable habits I can maintain long-term. Instead of just going to the gym, I got into the habit of consistent physical exercise I enjoy. I get most of my physical activity through bouldering, hiking, and running. Consistent bouldering has given me more motivation to train with a goal instead of the purely health-oriented gym routine I had in the past. I ran and hiked a lot before, but I feel I have struck a balance between what I enjoy and what keeps my mind and body active.
Social
In the first part of this year, I spent a lot of time with the same people I’ve been friends with through most of college, I made some new friends as well, but for the most part, my social circle stayed small. I knew going into 2023 that I would be moving across the country in the second half of the year for a (still) undetermined amount of time, so I wanted to do everything I could to enjoy the time I had with my friends nearby.
The second half of 2023 was very new to me socially. This was the first time in my life that I lived in an environment where I had no familiarity, friends, or family to keep me in my comfort zone. I knew going into this that I would have to put in work to expand my social circle, so I made a consistent effort to meet new people with similar interests to mine. I joined a few local hacker groups which helped me meet some cool people outside of work.
With the distance, time-zone differences, and busyness of life, relationships with others require a lot more effort and planning. I can no longer depend on spontaneity in the way I did when all of my friends were within a few miles of me. I made plans with friends to regularly talk and socialize online. For some friends that worked great, and for others I’ve since lost contact. While it saddens me to lose consistent contact with people I care about, it highlights just how important mutual effort and overall maturity are within my close friendships.
Goals for 2024
The practice of setting New Year’s Resolutions is often viewed as flawed, but establishing good goals over the course of a year in line with S.M.A.R.T goals has worked well for me. Here are some of the more broad goals I am okay with sharing publicly for 2024.
Hacking: Learning, Deep Dives, and Bounties
Hacking is a major part of my life, it went from a hobby to a profession through my first job and I need to take my skills to areas outside of work. I want to push myself to learn more, hack more, and have more fun. It’s a bit of a no-brainer, but I need to take a serious stab at bug bounty. I have poked at some public programs for fun in the past, and I regularly follow bug bounty reports and the overarching community online to educate myself for my job. A lot of the skills I use in my work are directly applicable to bounty hunting, so at a minimum participating in programs can make me better at my job. Independent of my profession, the challenge of hacking on established targets sounds like a whole lot of fun! This is a goal I struggle with setting measurable metrics since I want to avoid money-oriented goals as a beginner, so I instead want to leave a more open-ended goal. I aim to have 6 valid submissions above informational on existing bounty programs. I struggle with quantifying this aspect of it too, but I want to take the time over the year to get very knowledgeable on a handful of programs instead of hopping around from target to target with basic recon scripts. In my work, I perform best when I dive deep into an application and use that deep understanding to identify security issues. I think I can have some decent success with the same level of patience and dedication in the bounty space.
Blogging: Write a Minimum of 12 Blog Posts
This site has been up for over a year, and I’ve been reluctant to post any of my drafted blog posts. I have the freedom and desire to write blog posts about my interests but I always stop myself from posting for various illogical reasons. To make this goal a bit more measurable, I plan to write and post at least 6 technical and 6 non-technical blog posts. These distinctions are extremely loose, but in general, a technical topic for me would be anything related to hacking, security, privacy, programming, and/or engineering. Non-technical posts will likely be on topics that are not overly focused on something STEM.
Reading: Read 24 Books for Enjoyment
While I have been a consistent reader for years, I mostly read technical books with the goal of learning a new skill or furthering my knowledge on a topic. Outside of that, reading for enjoyment over the last few years for me has mostly been comics, manga, and light novels. I think it’s important to replace some of the lazy consumption of videos and TV shows in my free time with reading. I want to re-read classic novels I read as a kid with a more mature perspective, as well as enjoy new stories I’ve never read before. Two books a month is more than doable and I know I can pass 24 by a significant margin once I make a habit out of this goal.
Running: Run 400 Miles
For the last few months or so, I’ve consistently run 4-6 miles a week. This is not my only form of consistent exercise, it’s in addition to multiple indoor bouldering a week, and a hike once a week. I’ve been slowly increasing the distances of my runs, and stretching the steady increases I’ve already made across a year with some consistency should make this goal achievable.
Strength: 10 Clean Pull-ups In a Row
I’m hesitant to set climbing-specific goals since I only started climbing seriously this year. I want to focus on consistency with climbing and basic strength training instead of solely chasing harder-graded climbs. On a good day, I can do four decent pull-ups in a row. I try not to do any sort of kip, and I try to go all the way down between each pull-up. Over the course of a year, consistent climbing and other related workouts should help me get up to 10 undeniable pull-ups in a row. I need to come up with some other quantifiable strength goals, but for now, I am starting with this pull-up goal.