This year was really fun 🎉. In terms of advancements in AI, yes, but also on cybersecurity and cyber-offense fronts. There was a whirlwind in the world and on my personal fronts as well. 🌍

But one drastic consequence of AI isn't being considered. On the application and system security end, using these AI tools, both offense and defense are now more capable. A single person can do the job of 3 or 4 people, at least. And I faced some brunt at work myself due to it. It isn't news, but Optum's systems were cracked, and I worked on fixing security issues many times myself. 🛡️

On the work front, there's a ton I gained this year. My work profile improved significantly, and I'm sorta an architect now 👷‍♂️. It was fun to design and build new systems from scratch. Systems that scale dynamically as per provided configurations.

I participated in a few hackathons this year (3, to be exact) and secured 2nd place in the one organized by Optum itself 🥈. Possibly, it can be patented, and for me, that’s even better than 1st place. Can’t share details until it’s finalized, so... will discuss it later when the entire thing's done. 🤐

Along with that, my designs and code worked spectacularly on the deliverables I handled. Everything scaled beautifully as per configurations and requirements. So much so that I even received a commendation this year from our director (or possibly my VP), Archana Gupta, again 🏆. Some details are mentioned in my resume, so do check it out. And do give me a referral if possible 🙏.

One thing's for sure: my system analysis and reverse-engineering skills are better now than ever before. Salary's a bit less here, but I can't thank Optum 💼 enough for the knowledge it helped me gain here.

I’ve been solving a lot of DSA problems this year... for obvious reasons. I believe I solved over 400 problems this year, in contests and during my free time. I also learned many theoretical concepts and tricks by studying other people's code and posts. Many of these are documented in my GitHub repo, ascraeus-mons 👨‍💻. Beyond the jobs, I also explored how they are applied in the real world.

Out of curiosity, I started doing some CTFs and learned malware-development basics to understand hacking methodologies. I completed 16-17 CTFs 🕵️. Nothing considerable achieved there, though—too bad, right? Now that I'm sharing this, in the coming months, I'm planning to take my cybersecurity learning up a notch 🚀 for sure... I intended to post my progress here at my repo, supernova-hold and I intend to continue there only.

Also, again for obvious reasons, I’ve been reading a lot of research on cybersecurity, system architecture, and system design to grow as a better engineer. I really should post all my progress instead of waiting for inspiration to strike and jotting my thoughts down. Lessons from the book "Show Your Work" by Austin Kleon 📖.

Doing all these regularly might be why my mind has been obsessed with application performance and security in the first place. A classic example of applying knowledge from one place to a completely different domain 🔄.

I partially finished a couple projects this year. But application development is a recursive process, so, emphasis on "partial".

Basically I developed two agentic workflows, harnessing GPT-4o and LlaMA-8B, for my own workflows. One is used to automate writing posts for the DSA problems I solved and commiting and posting them automatically on the web with just one click. Another one, which I'm still working on, is a system that can automatically perform some generic research and prepare a knowledge base around the mentioned topic with some mentioned guidelines. Similar to what AutoGPT tries to do but with my own configurations, preferences and datasets.

Both I've kept closed-source for obvious reasons. 🤫. I might showcase them but only if I'm doing it in person.

This was a fun and memorable year, no doubt ✨. I want to do more, show even more, and I’m striving for just that… 💪

p.s. the above mentioned image is me on new year's eve...😊