Year in a Post (2021)

Here comes the obligated year end post. I am writing this on an empty stomach, shivering with a cold and fever. So bear with me and my writing.

Starting with the beginning of the year, I was in Addu, my hometown. Due to COVID lockdowns and such not much was done other than studying. I completed my second year and started my internship as well.

I joined Arcils for my internship and the first part of it was remote as I was in Addu. I got to work on some major projects at the game studio and was able to learn more about game development as well. Some of my work includes, working on a student management system, an e-commerce website, ThakuruWars auth, Arcils website and security auditing of both game and internal APIs as well. At Arcils, I learned to work on a scrum based project management system with Jira. I was also tasked with coming up with my own solutions and manage whole projects as I see fit. This wasn't a completely new experience but it has been a few years and it was good to relearn the ASP.NET Core stack.

Immediately after my internship ended, I moved back to Malaysia to finish my third year at University. As the year ends, I have finished one semester and it has been both fun and exhausting. Writing research is becoming much more easier and natural.

Looking into Baivaru this year, we did not do much. However, we managed to introduce BMDB, a web app that further improves our Baivaru Media project. BMDB comes with machine learning capabilities and it can suggest media based on your favorites. The recommendation model is absolutely awesome. Shoutout to Ashraq, Naamee and everyone else who worked tirelessly to make it a reality. Other than that, there was some work done by Ashraq on Dhivehi ML, but the rest of us mostly worked on maintaining the existing bots and bug fixes. Let's just say we took a break this year to focus more on our personal growth. Next year, hopefully we have some exciting projects coming up!

As far as my blog goes, this was a pretty successful year as I wrote on some interesting topics and started on a series about cyber securities as well (a solemn promise to continue it as soon as I have some time). Athfan, Hammadh and I also worked on a podcast, which we later forgot to continue XD. During the year, Iyad, Athfan and I also got to talk about cyber security in a forum on Clubhouse. I have done a few certifications including Fortinet's Network Security, AWS Academy Cloud Architeching and Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. A more detailed list of my certifications are on my LinkedIn profile.

This year would have been a complete disaster if not for that one person who always makes everything better. Thank you for the constant inspiration, motivation and being the best girlfriend ❤️. I am blessed to have you in my life.  

With university ending in a few months, 2022 is going to be a challenging year. But I am really looking forward to it. A huge shoutout to everyone who helped me out during the year and tough times. Hope everyone has a good 2022!