2024 : Year End Review

This is the first time I am writing a year in review, inspired (and pushed) by Nancy (hers is here) and Vaidik's habit of writing year in review. I tried writing this last year as well, but then after a week the initial motivation fizzled out.

Its been a wonderful year with multiple important events in my life.

The Company - Birth of SecureMyOrg

For as long as I can remember, I had always wanted to build something and create a company out of it. In September end 2023 I finally left my full time job at Rippling and by Dec'23 completed any and all consulting gigs. I started registration process for a private limited company and after a few name rejections, got the incorporation certificate for the company on 27th December. At the time, I was enamoring the shore temple of Mahabalipuram when I got the message of incorporation of the company.

At SecureMyOrg, we provide our customers with cybersecurity services — pentest, red teaming, cybersecurity consulting, building open source security stack.

We would love your referrals. If you want to get a free cybersecurity consultation for your company, please book a calendar invite here - Free Security Consultaion link here.

I am still in the process of writing about my first year as a founder, will publish that soon. It's a roller coaster of learnings and emotions.

First talk in the US

Last June I flew across the Atlantic for the first time, for my talk at CloudNative SecurityCon, CNCF in Seattle. The talk was about building and gamifying the security culture at your organisation. This was something I had first built at Rippling and then also helped other organisations improve their security culture. If this sounds interesting, here's the talk link -

Moved to US and started my Masters at Carnegie Mellon University

As an ethical hacker, someone getting to my data is always a concern to me. In fact the multitudes of ways websites (read 'big tech') can get your data is humongous. I have always been curious about the different stealth technologies companies use to invade your privacy and how you can protect from them.

I started my Masters in Privacy Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), this year. The kind of bright minds you're surrounded with here, is unlike anywhere I've ever been, whether it be peers or professors. Professors here are extremely inspiring. Something I've learnt here is that the work ethics of people here is really good. Everyone strives to work honestly and give their best. There's a healthy amount of competition as well, which I liked.

When I used to play CTF in my undergrad, I got to know that the top team in these hacking competitions, was CMU's Pwning Plaid of Parliament (PPP) team and also one of the seniors, Jay Bosamiya, whom I befriended at the world finals of CSAW CTF 2017, held at IIT Kanpur, did his PhD from CMU. Thus CMU was a natural choice of place to be.

The campus is beautiful with a lot of interesting things. Such as the enigma from World War 2. In the past few months that I've been here, I met a whole lot of wonderful people and saw awesome work from a lot of people here.

If you have any questions about MS or staying here in US, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge or at the very least guide you to the right person 😃

Homeserver

I have been a very 'privacy-practical' person and a strong proponent of replacing (if possible) proprietary software with usable Open Source Software (OSS). This helps not only keeping your data with yourself, but also total control on playing with whatever way you want it to work. And, yes it comes with its caveats, with the upsides being high if done properly.

Discovering the /r/selfhosted have opened a plethora of knowledge to my thirst for this. It scrathed that nerdy itch in my brain and gave a satisfying feeling that you have of, now you can do anything. It satisfied that builder itch in my brain that I knew was somewhere there but couldn't exactly pin-point to. I plunged in the rabbit hole for a while, fascinated by all the knowledge that people had to share --- de-googling their life or automating their life using self hosted n8n + llaman etc etc. It was like you could replace every one of these proprietary softwares' that you use in your day-to-day life with an OSS alternative.

The next thing to do was to get a home server, since this was my first attempt I didn't want to invest in something fancy, reading more about it I got to know the best would be to use a minipc, which I got to know from 'TinyMiniMicro'[1]. Using old 'business' pcs as homeservers. The ideal reason to use this was, this had low power consumption (<30W) and had decent config. Some common examples are -

1. HP EliteDesk
2. HP ProDesk
3. Dell Optiplex

They serve the market better than a card size computer (raspberry pi, zimmaboard etc) and any others is because of the low cost of it, the features (x64 support, expansion slots) and durability as these were essentially enterprise options, so made to last.

A detailed guide on how I went about choosing one and how you could do the same + the setup and running cost ( including electricity ) would be coming out next month ( feb 2025 ). I am still measuring the electricity cost to run the whole setup, hence a month from now.

The first one I built was with HP Elitedesk with 1TB ssd memory running at my parent's house. The one with me has the current configuration I am running locally is a GMKTec K8 Plus with 32G RAM and 1TB SSD + 2TBx2 SATA 2 bay enclosure running in RAID1 configuration.

The reason I bought this beefy mini pc instead of building with the ebay one was to not only use this as a homeserver but also as a gaming pc for some decent gaming (yes it runs Cyberpunk 2077 easily) for those days when I want to play some games.

The most important service I run is an immich service that has my ~107GB of photos, videos backed up.

Travels and Places

This year I travelled to a lot of places and saw a lot of beautiful things. While its not possible to put all of those here, I'll dump some of my phone gallery here 😀

EU Trip - KubeCon Paris

This year I travelled to Europe for KubeCon Paris, attending 5 day conference in the capital of France. It was awesome experience, met a lot of people there.

From Paris, we went to Belgium, Amsterdam, Turkey and finally back to India. We were lucky to travel in hot air balloon in Cappadocia, as the weather conditions were good then.

Seattle - CloudNative Security Con

This was the first time I got a chance to fly across the Atlantic. I was delivering my talk about security leaderboard. The city is beautiful.

While travelling around Pike Place and seeing the first Starbucks of the world, I also got the time to go through Seattle Aquarium, it was a breathtaking experience.

I also had the chance to visit Mount Rainier before heading to the conference in the city.

My return flight to India was through NYC and thus got a chance to explore the city for a day and meet my friends there.

Some other trip memories

This new year I was in Washington DC and went to the Lincoln Memorial and US Senate at night.

I had the chance to spend my christmas 🎄 in Florida and went to Kennedy Space Center.

Thank You !

The year 2024 had been filled with a lot of learnings, adventures, happy and emotional moments.

Hoping a happy and growing 2025 ✌️

References

1. 13 July 2020 - Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution