+++ title = "My life story in tech so far ig 🤷" date = 2025-01-31 slug = "my-life-story-with-tech" description = "I was applying for a college cybersecurity camp and wrote this absolute monster that amounts to an overview of my life in tech so far (till 16)"

[taxonomies] tags = ["yap fest", "biography"] +++

I was applying for a Cybersecurity college camp for this summer and realized this is honestly a pretty good summary of my life in tech so far (till i'm 16) and that I should probably make it a blog post soooo here it is!

The yap#

Hi! My name is Kieran, and I've been interested in / involved with cybersecurity and programming since I first started using a laptop at 10! I started out with a raspberry pi 3b+ which taught me how to use debian as well as the basics of creating and maintaining databases and web services. I moved on to an ubuntu laptop about a year latter and started using my raspberry pi as a home server to run small websites on our local lan. Soon I wanted to share them with others and expose them to the internet, so I learned how to use dns and port forwarding and then how to secure the server to prevent attacks with tools like fail2ban!

{caption="I still have that same rpi today! It's joined with all the random tech bits in two enormously heavy bins in my closet"}

Over the next 2 years, I systematically read every single book in the tech section of my local library and became interested in white-hat hacking. I taught myself how to use kali linux and metasploit with the help of many web searches and had quite a bit of fun rooting and then sideloading custom payloads onto our families set of kindle fires (I was eventually restricted to just playing with just one but I did make a home security system with all of them once). I figured out wireshark and started playing with wifi protocals but eventually reached the limit of what I could figure out on my own and took a quick detour of two years to learn blender and build my first computer.

I became interested in home labs and self hosting services around 14 and bought an old workstation off ebay which combined with my set of 3 rasberry pis and several old laptops (and one old pentium tower that I found on the side of the road) made quite a nice playground for deploying my own services. Half a year later I had to pick it all up and move up north which was quite the adventure; my services got completely messed up during the move, and it took my a week or so tinkering with everything to get it back to a stable state.

{caption="2021-2022 is mainly just unity and hugo sites lol; I really started seriously using it and doing contributions to other projects 2023-2025. You can also see where I broke my wrist in January of 2025"}

After the move, I became quite interested in front end development and started making quite a few websites and various random coding projects. If you look on my GitHub contributions graph (github.com/taciturnaxolotl, you can see it go from a lightly speckled grid in 2021 and 2022 to a much more solid commit streak in 2023. I only had one week when I didn't code anything and that was the second week of the year :) Toward the end of that year I started learning about hardware design and made my first PCB! I also joined a wonderful community called hackclub where I met a ton of amazing teenagers who were also interested in tech just like me! I joined an FRC robotics team in January of the next year and had a blast designing, building, and programming a custom meter square, 150 lb, industrial robot to compete in that year's game!

{caption="I loved working on purple bubble 💖 i worked with some pretty incredible people and learned a ton. ik know yall are probably reading this when rss drops it so 🫶"}

During that same time I also started a 501(c)3 named Purple Bubble with friends that I had met through Hackclub focused on making a secure, cost-effective, and privacy preserving messaging protocol. We drafted a specification and poured many, many hours into planning and developing the protocol over the next year but eventual realized that the messaging protocol space is incredibly hard and that there were innate flaws in our protocol that would compromise the security of the app (We couldn't find a good way to anonymize connections to a network of server's while also providing zero metadata transfer of messages between servers; we had originally planned for the protocol to be zero trust federated, but this proved to be a challenge that, no matter how hard we kept thinking and talking about it, we couldn't find a solution too). I learned a huge amount about organizing a group of people and running an organization through that experience and made some wonderful friends, so it wasn't entirely in vain.

My latest project and biggest learning experience in both security and development has been building a time tracking server for coding called Hackatime. It is fully compatible with the popular wakatime.org, which allows it to leverage the hundreds of existing extensions for tracking time spent coding in almost every popular IDE and editor. I made this as a part of an event Hackclub ran called High Seas where they encouraged high school students to make cool projects by giving out awesome prizes for time spent coding (you had to "ship" your project where it would get voted on by the other four thousand teens participating and then via a custom ELO system convert your hours into "doubloons" that could be redeemed for prizes like framework laptops, soldering irons, McMaster Car credits, and many others. If you want to learn more about it, the website is highseas.hackclub.com). In order to track the time of the thousands of teenagers participating, I created this server which was handling thousands of users an hour and hundreds of requests a second. I learned how to scale the server and database and learned an incredible amount that only comes at scale. At one point I got an email that the database bill had increased so much over the previous month that we were going to hit both the $1k hard limit and then a $4k limit that I had placed on the monthly bill, expecting never to hit it. The team hosting the database (Cockroach DB) graciously offered to reduce our bill down to only $500 which was incredible. There were many more instances where things broke, or where I discovered security issues that made me grow an insane amount in my knowledge of how to fix things and really pushed me out of my comfort zone. (If you want to take a look at the github repo it is at github.com/hackclub/hackatime and the hosted version is at waka.hackclub.com with a live hours counted tracker)

{caption="The price really sky rocketed as we started using it in prod 😂"}

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I want to major in, and I'm pretty solidly split between Comp Sci with a cybersecurity focus and Computer/Electrical Engineering. I'm hoping that this camp can help make that decision a bit more clear and give me a better understanding of what getting a major in Cyber Security would be like!