Almost End of Summer

Lots of things have happened since the last time I've blogged. Let me try to recap some of the highlights and my thoughts!

I have finished my 16 week internship at Amazon and have since moved back to Vancouver. Say hello to amazing asian food! I have missed it dearly since moving south of the border! :) I have also received notification that I will receive a full-time offer with Amazon. I am currently interviewing other big tech companies as well. I shall see in near future where I'll go to after graduation.

I'm a little sad to be leaving Seattle and I had lots of fun during my internship. You will not believe how much better I got at Ping Pong in the span of a summer. (Thanks Milo for pushing me better everyday!) I had some very awesome co-workers that are very positive and supportive of what I do. I gained lots of experience in developing on Ruby on Rails, general HTML/JS best practices and knowledge of Computer Security. Computer Security is such an interesting field and it was such a great opportunity to be around with co-workers that are so knowledgeable in this field. They taught me a lot.

I'm almost done reading the "Web Application Hacker's Handbook" (2nd edition) and I have to say that I am very impressed with that book! Totally worth every penny I've spent on it. It taught me so much about web application security flaws and how hard it is to keep a web application secure. I've also read "The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing" and it mentions about the Backtrack Linux Distribution that contains a whole lot of hacking tools. I'm really excited to try that out. I'll report back next time about it. On a side note, now that I'm getting more experience in this field, I have started noticing issues with really vulnerable web application. For example, the other day, I reported to the web admin of a PHP web application that his app contained some serious security flaws that included possible SQL injection, XSS, CSRF and improper session control!

On the ultimate side, lots of tournaments in the past month or so. I was in Toronto for 9 days to compete at the World u23 Ultimate Championships where my team placed 3rd. It wasn't quite what we were looking for but I am happy with the progress in what the team achieved. After a weekend off, I went to ECC to compete with Traffic. It was in Seattle this time so it was quite nice that I didn't have to travel out of town to play in a tournament! :D Just this past weekend, I moved home the night of my last internship to go back to Vancouver to compete in the Canadian Ultimate Championships that was held at UBC. Traffic swept through the competition to win the overall title. It was so much more exciting that my two friends, Yunduz and Byron, came out to watch despite that they have very little familiarity with the sport! That made my day! :D

What am I up to next? Two more weeks till school starts and I'm actually quite excited. It's always fun to go back to school after getting more industry experience because you learn so much while working in the industry. I find programming assignments getting easier per passing term. I'm looking to take Philosophy 220 (Intro to Logic), Functional Programming and Intro to Computer Security (EECE 412). This means I have lots of my time in my schedule and I haven't decided how to fill it out. I can fill it out by finding random employment but I'm not super in dire of money at the moment or go find a research lab that would want me or perhaps go spend some personal time in learning more technical stuff on my time. I feel like the third option sounds more fun! :)