Originally I only planned to go to the study night, but since I was still early enough, my buddies convinced me and another friend to go to the Tech & Meet session about the Belgian Cyber Command. There we learned a lot about the general operations of the Belgian Cyber Command. Obviously, all of this information was given under ‘NDA’. But there was only a single clause which allowed pictures to be taken. So here is a little diagram.

What we also learned during this tech and meet session is that there are active recruitement efforts ongoing, but that the current problem lies in the fact that no one can pas the fysical tests.

After the session we did some networking with the speeker and learned that the aformentioned issue is activly being worked on by removing the fitness test for people wanting to work for the cyber command.

Sadly after the networking i was tired and the Study Night had finished so i went home knowing a bit more about the constant war that is happening in cyber space, so i can sleep knowing that my browser history is safe.

early morning

On the morning of 19 November 2024 i got up at rougly 4:30 to get dressed and unlike my partner for the day i was able to drink a morning coffee. As Today was going to be a tough day, because wehere going to Hack The Future wich is a hackathon for Students from every branch of the IT sector. After jamming to some tunes in my car using my own android auto music player application i arrived in Bruge to take the bus. once on the bus everybody slept until we where there.

The Hackathon

Me and my fellow student/partner signed up for the .NET challenges, and boy where we challenged. from flying a spaceship to solving intergalatic riddles using C#.

It was an incredible experience to attempt to crack the challenges they threw at us. These where also the kind of challenges where you don’t have to code allot but think about algorithms etc. Wich was exactly the kind of challenge i craved.

The break

There was a break during the middle of the event, wich was a perfect opertunity to talk with the other contestants and to do some networking. It was also during this time i figured out where the good coffee was, wich would be of crucial importance for the next halve of the Hackathon.

The Winners?

During the leadup to the anouncement of the winner, there was dinner service. Wich was delicious and plentiful and continously being served. During the anouncement for the winners we learned that we did not win, but my partner in crime and i had the best time of our lives. So 10/10 would do it again!

As one of the final assignements for my bachelors degree we had to make a Portfolio site, this is the blog detailing that journey. So first things first:

Finding the right tool for the job

As i am not that good at website development i needed something simple and easy to both use and setup. Wich left me 2 major optionns WordPress or static site generation. I choose the later as my previous experience with WordPress was not that good. With static site generation there where 3 major options i knew about wich where, hugo, docusaurus or jekyll. I choose jekyl as hugo was just not good enough and docusaurus was to rigid. Jekyll was also the recommended static site generator from Github, wich also made it very easy to setup using github actions. So i went to work, after 10 minutes of finding a nice template and setting up the action i wen to work on the next step.

Figuring out the template and developing the website

So before i did anything i looked trough the template to get my bearings after that i threw all the template parts out and started with making my portfolio, because the site is automaticly updated by github actions it is very easy to make minor changes and apply these. After having made the portfolio i copied the html and css used for the portfolio and applied it for my blog posts, ofcoarse with a couple of changes for the blogposts. because jekyll uses markdown to generate the website it is very easy to write a new blog post or change my portfolio later on ensuring it stays maintainable longterm and has free hosting by github.

I also chose to use only visual pictures that give a small glimpse, wich also forces the reader to discover the portfolio fully. I also wanted there to be a brief introductory whit a button to download my CV, wich i was able to with some Prompt Engineering and AI usage.

Making a good portfolio site does not always have to be hard or expensive or need WordPress. No jekyll makes it very easy for you to host your own blog, portfolio, project documentation for free with github pages.

Try Hack Me journey from student to carreer

on the 25th of Februari i had nothing planned in the evening that week so i decided to go to the Tech & Meet session about TryHackMe hosted on campus. the session was presented by Niels Deryckere, an alumnus of Howest with a passion for ethical hacking and vulnerability research. The session turned out to be incredibly iteresting, even tough i was studying software engineering. He began sharing his personal history on how he started out as student tracking simple bugs in his free time to doing it full time. He also introduced me to the concept of a CVE(Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) and explained how we as students, with the help of TryHackMe can learn how to track down these CVE’s. He also showed common places of where these so called CVE’s are declared.

His story was one where continous learning is very important, as it showed me that you are never done learning new things and always have to keep up with the latest trends.