I’m continuing the practice of reflecting on the year that passed.
Looking back at 2024, I will answer these questions:
- What went well this year?
- What didn’t go so well this year?
- What am I working towards?
1. What went well this year?
My travel in South America
This trip has been my plan for a very long time, and I’m so happy to finally be able to take it.
It’s been ten months of wandering on this beautiful continent. During this time, I met many lovely people, made some strong connections, and even started building a relationship with a special person. My Spanish has improved here, and I now feel comfortable engaging in more advanced conversations.
It’s hard to capture my whole journey here.
I volunteered at a hostel in Montevideo for around five weeks, then at a farm outside Buenos Aires, and finally a month at a dog shelter in Peru.
I’ve spent quite some time in Uruguay. There is a wonderful tech community here, and I was pleasantly surprised by how the size of it. Ruby/Rails meetups are regularly held here, I joined a couple of them, one even had around 50-60 participants. Everybody is so welcoming and approachable, they even applauded me for being from Romania. They are definitely doing an excellent job bringing the community together.
The infosec community is not lacking here also, there are almost monthly OWASP meetups, culminating with the December meetup by OWASP Rio de la Plata. There were around 600 participants and lots of awesome speakers. The talks were in Spanish, but I was able to understand them (ok, maybe around 80% of what was going on).
Letting go of social anxiety
As I traveled almost this entire year, the socializing opportunities were all around. I was looking for hostel stays. Although intense at times, being in this highly social environment is beneficial for building social skills.
All this helped me become comfortable with new spaces, and approaching people I don’t know yet. It even builds resilience by adapting to the unknown and to diverse perspectives.
The ability to meet people, form connections, and exchange ideas is so important. Even more essential in the era of AI where the threat of replacement looms over everyone. That’s why I’m stressing fine-tuning these abilities.
My first contribution to an open-source project
Another thing I had under my radar for a long time. Contributing to open-source projects always felt intimidating. This past year I committed to this, got over my insecurities, and made it happen.
My very first contribution went to the Casa project from Ruby for Good organization. This is a group of tech professionals who create software solutions for social good.
The maintainers were patient and communicated well, resulting in a positive experience.
Soon after, I pushed other contributions toward Casa and another Ruby for Good project, Human Essentials.
In the future, I intend to contribute more towards these positive projects. I recommend this to everybody thinking about contributing, just take the leap. It is an awesome way to shape your skills, meet others in this field, and learn from people more advanced than you.
2. What didn’t go so well this year?
This was a truly positive year, and I have no regrets. It took me a while to think about what would fall under this header.
But some things can be mentioned.
Not having a routine to learn cybersec
Traveling and changing places so often is not conducive to following a routine while learning. I didn’t enjoy as much time as I wanted to sit down and learn more about this field. I focused on exploring my surroundings, meeting people, and improving my social skills. This made the most sense as I was fortunate enough to be in this travel and wanted to take advantage of it.
Nevertheless, I didn’t fully stop learning. I spent most of the time on the Hack The Box platform which offers some of the best learning resources and labs I found.
I finished their “Information Security Foundations” path and almost all “SOC Analyst” job role path, plus other misc resources. This encompasses around 22 completed modules.
Not being consistent with sport/physical exercise
This is again related to the absence of a routine. Besides some hiking in nature and exploring the cities on foot, I haven’t practiced physical exercise as often as I wanted.
This lack of exercise catches on me and I feel I’m becoming more sluggish. That is not just physical, but mental as well. Even my creativity gets affected after a while.
I realized that I don’t like indoor gyms, except for bouldering walls, and running in a city with so many cars isn’t enjoyable for me.
3. What am I working towards?
Continue my cybersec journey (getting certified)
I’m committed to this transition and there are so many new things to learn. This time of travel allowed me to explore this field better. Playing around with different aspects of cybersecurity, I’m now leaning more on the Blue teaming/defensive security. This is generally considered a more boring side of the cybersec, but for some reason, it caught on me. I don’t find it boring at all. Discovering ways to harden a system, analyzing malware, or searching the logs for post-attack artifacts all sounds fascinating. And even more, wondering about ways to integrate AI into this.
Blue teaming is in itself a grand system, and I’m still figuring out my place in it. Inspired by some people in the cybersec space, I started documenting my journey in this field.
Connecting with professionals in the cybersec space
Simply gathering knowledge is not enough, meeting colleagues is an essential part. I realized I don’t personally know many people in this field, maybe there are two I can think of. When I switched to programming, I was in the same spot, but eventually, I got to build a good network of mentors and peers.
These next years, I’m looking to do the same in the cybersecurity field.
More contributing to open-source projects
After my initial contribution, I recognized its learning potential. You get access to a legacy project with more advanced issues. These complex issues will challenge you when finding ways to solve them. It also improves communication and collaboration skills, if you’re stuck, you can get help from the team. Also, as the code and git history are public, you can see how others have solved more complex issues before.
In the future, I’m looking to contribute more to these positive projects, focussed more on those related to cybersecurity and ruby/rails.