Hello! Hope everyone is doing well. I can’t believe 2025 passed by so quickly. So much stuff happened last year that I barely had the time to make any blog posts. Hopefully this year will be different, but we’ll see…
Anyway this post mostly serves to fill in the large gap from last year, and also talking about some stuff to look forward to in 2026.
One of the best years of my life
It’s no doubt to me that 2025 was one of the best years of my life. I traveled to so many new places, met so many people for the first time, and overall so many things just fell into place in a great way.
2025 was also a really busy year, with at least 10 different trips I can remember. Last fall was so busy that I earned my first B in Differential Equations simply because I missed so many in-class quizzes it didn’t matter what I got on the exams.
I don’t really have a good way to describe everything I did last year, so I’ll just list the major ones below in chronological order:
- Won ISTS 2025 in Rochester, mostly CTF-carried
- First SWCCDC in Tulsa, honestly don’t enjoy the style but traveling was fun
- Hosted TAMUctf 2025, went pretty well I think
- LakeCTF 2025 in Lausanne, Switzerland, got 4th
- Stayed in DC over the summer for an internship, thanks Jax
- CyberSci Finals in Canada as US guest team, fun scavenger hunt
- DEFCON Finals, usual trolling :p, party was fun
- Accepted to HRT for SWE summer internship!! Thanks so much JoshL
- ECSC 2025 in Warsaw, Poland, got 2nd! great popoff
- First CPTC, we ended up in California somehow
- ICC 2025 in Tokyo, big highlight, Japan was amazing
- BHMEA Finals in Riyadh, met Peter and co. again
<insert pictures here when i get around to it>
Recently, I’ve also started playing Project Sekai a lot and getting more into rhythm games (thx japan). Unfortunately TAMU has like absolutely nothing so I’ll be starving…
What’s next
Looking forward to 2026, I still have a fairly busy year too. We managed to qualify for SECCON Finals in 2026 as well as LakeCTF again, so I’ll be going back there hopefully. Other than that, ICC will be in May in Australia, and ECSC will be in (i think) Germany? So lots of traveling again this year.
Also, I just finished NSA Codebreaker for 2025 recently, so there will be a blogpost up about that soon after the competition ends.
Besides CTFs, of course I’m also looking forward to my internship this summer. I’m really excited to work at HRT but also a bit hesitant since I feel like I’ll get spoiled by the work environment there.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Hope everyone has a great 2026! See you soon!