Posts on Joyce Kung

2020: Reading ~52 Books in ~52 Weeks

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:05:57 -0500

TL;DR: I read a lot of books this year. I put some on lists. I will not justify these lists.¹

At the end of 2019, I vaguely thought about reading one book a week in 2020. It was going to be one of my “New Year’s Resolutions”,² and I really felt like I missed reading for fun again.³

That term - fall 2019 - I had taken one of my favourite classes ever in university - ENGL 208N: Sex in Literature, and after reading a bunch of raunchy shit for class - after finding reading fun again! despite reading for assignments - I decided I wanted to try reading, a lot, again, for real.

On Learning to Read (Literary Writing)

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 15:02:54 -0500

I’m a few days into my first gig as a reader in the Stone of Madness masthead, and I feel I need to learn how to read literary writing better.

In my circle of friends (primarily techies who have interests in some form of art), I’m the “English”/“literary”¹ friend. I like reading, and I like poetry specifically.

But my primary source of poetry (up until about this year) has been from classes.² This meant:

Writeup: MetaCTF CyberGames 2020

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 08:54:17 -0400

Last weekend MetaCTF hosted their annual CyberGames, lasting 24 hours from Sat Oct 24 12PM EDT to Sun Oct 25 12PM EDT. They had over 1500 teams sign up, with tracks for both students and non-students. My friends and I signed up for the student track as press start to braincell and had a fun (and frustrating) time.

As with other CTFs we’ve done, this writeup is by no means conclusive - more of a “throw it on the wall and see what sticks” - and is written by Dean Jiao, Ruju Jambusaria, and me, of course.

Writeup: b01lers CTF bootcamp 2020

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 16:57:20 -0400

Last weekend, b01lers from Purdue University had their CTF bootcamp designed for beginners from Saturday Oct 4 9AM EDT to Sunday Oct 5 8PM EDT. It was a busy weekend for why not make team, so I was the only one able to participate (and even then, I didn’t have too much time).

As with Down Under CTF, I didn’t end up finishing all the challenges (not even close!) so this will serve as a record of what I’ve tried (and what didn’t work).

Abandoning Github Pages for Netlify (ii)

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the first part of this post, I discussed getting and setting up a custom domain for this site (and all its various challenges).
In this post, I’ll be talking about how I abandoned all that hard work just to go back to Netlify.

Another thing that’s become obviously lacking in my blog setup has been the ability to collaborate (read: for people I know to edit my work).¹ This was something that became painfully obvious the week after Down Under CTF, where I basically just published our writeup, and then let my friends go on the blog and point out my mistakes as they were sitting in production.

Custom Domains on Github Pages Are Hard (i)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using my Hugo setup for just over a month now (and really enjoying it!), but I’ve made a few changes to this blog that I think are going to make things even better:

I have a custom domain now
I’m using Netlify for hosting, instead of Github Pages
I’m taking advantage of Netlify’s Deploy Previews

All of these changes came with some level of consideration, so I want to take some time to walk through my thought process here. (Just in case anyone else is thinking about it!)

Building a chmod calculator in Go

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 21:36:28 -0400

One of the things that really irked me as I started to learn more about Linux was using the chmod command.

When I first learned the chmod command in school, we learned to explicity declare the permissions:

$ chmod a+x file.txt

However, whenever running through tutorials or, really, anything that involved chmod, I found that most people like to use the numeric (octal) format instead¹:

$ chmod 777 file.txt

I knew there was some kind of math involved with chmod, so I decided it would be fun to try writing a chmod calculator in Go, a language I started learning this summer.

Writeup: Down Under CTF 2020

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 09:28:04 -0400

This past weekend, my friends and I had the chance to participate in Down Under CTF 2020, a CTF aimed at Australian secondary- and tertiary-school students. Though our team didn’t come anywhere close to placing, or even completing all the challenges, we had a fun time and learned some new techniques for our next CTF.

This writeup is a team effort by me, Dean Jiao, and Ruju Jambusaria, and was written while we were solving challenges. It is not an exhaustive writeup (please consult the organizers’ writeup for a full writeup). Instead, this writeup is a collaborative effort in exploring dead ends, throwing ideas on the wall, and seeing what sticks.

Linux Upskill Challenge: Setting up on Google Cloud Platform

Sun, 06 Sep 2020 14:02:54 -0400

This September¹, I’m going to participate in the Linux Upskill Challenge. I read about it a little on Hacker News yesterday, and it looks like it aligns really well with my goals of working as an SRE.

The challenge starts tomorrow, so today is “Day 0” of 20: getting set up. It’s possible that I may create new posts related to this challenge - even though the content is listed publicly on Github at all times - but we’ll see at the end of this month.

Looking for Work: New Grad Edition

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 09:34:49 -0400

UPDATE (2020-11-13): I am no longer looking for work! Happy to say that I accepted a position as a Site Reliability Engineer in Toronto working remotely for a company. May share more details about this as my start date looms closer (as it stands, we’re about 7 months out), but haven’t decided yet. Going to leave this post up for posterity’s sake. Thanks to anyone who sent me an email about this over the last couple months!

Writeup: SANS Interactive Beginner Challenge CTF

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 10:22:11 -0400

Last week I had the chance to participate in the SANS Interactive Beginner Challenge CTF as part of a qualification round for the SANS Security Training Scholarship by Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS). [Edit: I also made it forward to the next round!] This was a closed, Jeopardy-style CTF that ran for four days (Aug 7-10). It was also a solo CTF, although we did have a Slack channel where people occasionally shared hints to especially hard-to-solve problems.

A note on my former blog

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 03:16:47 +0400

Moving to more technical content.