A New Chapter

 

Hello, world!

 

The last time I posted to this blog was nearly half a year ago (6 months ago in April). At the time, I was finishing up my last semester of college, working on creating my own penetration testing lab, and I had just finished this website. So… what have I been up to since then? What’s new?

 

A lot has changed since then — for the better!

 

I graduated from college and obtained my bachelor’s degree in computer science in May. It’s been a long time coming — but I finally did it. As the first person in my immediate family to graduate from college, this achievement has surely made my family proud.

 

I finished that penetration testing lab I was working on, and I learned so much along the way. Since I documented everything I learned, you can read all about it by clicking this link: Homemade Penetration Testing Lab.

 

I started using Hack The Box — an online platform that provides hands-on cybersecurity training and challenges through virtual labs and capture the flag (CTF) exercises. It’s really fun! It really gamifies ethical hacking in a way that gets you hooked.

 

I finished a little Python coding project in which I created a command line tool using the Typer library. The command line tool shows off many of the features/options that Typer includes. I did this by going through the entire Typer documentation and implementing nearly every option/feature I encountered. Along the way, as a little bonus, I learned how to use the OpenAI’s API to make queries to their large language models, such as GPT-3.5 Turbo. Why did I decide do this little project? Well, ethical hackers practically live inside the terminal, and many penetration testing tools are only accessible via the command line. As such, if I were to ever release my own command line tool, I need to be able to know how to create one. That’s why I decided to take on this project. It was a fun — I really enjoy coding! I look forward to studying and mastering the sacred Zen of Python.

 

Outside of these technical endeavors, I started experimenting and playing around with Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence program that generates images from natural language descriptions, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. According to themselves, “Midjourney is an independent research lab that explores new mediums of thought and expands the imaginative powers of the human species.” I 100% agree with that statement. The images you can create on Midjourney are simply jaw-dropping. When I need a break from all the super technical cybersecurity stuff, I hop on Midjourney free my mind at night and explore my imagination.

 

Outside of anything computer related, I learned how to drive and obtained my driver’s license. This was something way overdue, but i finally got around to doing it. Additionally, I got back into running; after being physically inactive for months (I’ve been super busy), this was a much needed activity to keep my health up.

 

That’s about it — those have been my major updates from the past few months.

 

Where do I go from here? Here are the next short-term goals on my personal roadmap: