RLOS Week 3 (and first day at Microsoft)

This Weekend

• This weekend was Memorial Day Weekend and Indian Arrival Day in my home country. I ended up spending Saturday and Sunday with people from my LA hackerspace, as their flagship conference was this weekend. It was a LOT of fun. There were talks on reverse engineering, malware, lockpicking, packet sniffing, what bug bounty hunters and game hackers have in common, and hardware and software hacking contests. I ended up staying late listening to audio in their “chill” channel, which was subsequently raided by some of the group cooking and chatting (but not at a level that was distracting from the music), which was a pretty cool vibe. I couldn’t turn my camera on at the time (something something weekend lazy shower), but I had a great time.
• There were speakers from as far as Finland, and it was just a blast. On top of the general, main talks, they had smaller talks and Q and A in Discord voice channels, and a “Raise Me” channel, for those interested in careers in Infosec. I completely have to remember to donate this summer to this hackerspace!
• Someone came in the Twitch chat and asked if they could donate, and one of the keyholders said they weren’t taking donations for the event, but that the person should “feel free to donate to their favourite hackerspace”, because they do the event for the love of it, and it’s supposed to be a fun, hands-on event. Many years ago, I also volunteered at the event, as a way to get a free ticket (I used to do a lot of that whenever I really wanted to attend but didn’t have the means otherwise to attend, especially if it was in my city, or a city to which I could bus).

I also got a fair amount of work done

• Because of the talks and general shenanigans going on, I was able to code while watching the talks, pushing a bunch of code, and now I’m up watching old Ghidra and x86 disassembly videos (Quite a few people were using Ghidra this weekend, and Hackaday has a really neat playlist of a class if you’re interested!). I was able to get a bit of work done towards week 3, but there is something I have questions about, which is good because our meeting is tomorrow (or may be “today” by the time I am done writing this).
• I really like writing code in the evenings and late at night, but it destroys my schedule during the day. Ideally, I would love a schedule where I could get up at noon or something, start working at 6pm, and stay up until 4am.

Blockchain Fellowship

• I met two out of three stewards this morning for my fellowship, to see how they could help (they do this with all of the fellows early on).
• As I got into my second conversation, my steward said, based on my interests and getting to know me more, “if you’d like, you can spend your time learning about and writing zk proofs” and I immediately lit up, so I think I’m going to do that. I’m already sorta-kinda in that community, and there may be opportunities to contribute to projects from other fellows, too. Finally, the group itself that I’m in is still going to do equip us with knowledge about how to audit blockchain and that sort of thing, so it would be a nice complement. And it’s very doable, considering I learned a bit about NIZK and that sort of thing in my secure distributed computing class (I keep getting A plus-es in my encryption classes haha; that’s the other one I got an A+ in). I’ve already decided that I’m not just going to rely on my institution to teach me everything; a lot of grad school is self-directed, even though, yes, you’re essentially doing an apprenticeship (and getting paid for it).

Internship

• Finally, I’m starting my internship this week! I have ensured that I have a clear amount of time that lines up with my team (tentatively).
• They sent me a super large monitor that I thought was a small dog, that I don’t know would fit on my desk, but we’ll see :)
• I’m super excited, and will update or write another post perhaps this week! I’ve been really enjoying everything!!!

And that’s it!