 Oh hey, it's me! This is weird. So for a long time I've been wanting to do these like face to face videos because it looks like that's what people want to watch on YouTube these days. They want like this emotional connection with the person they're watching or some kind of like seeing the personality behind the channel. So I know this isn't like my usual screen capture on the keyboard real tech stuff so maybe some people won't like it but that's okay. If you don't like it, just don't watch it. But I am trying to be closer with the community that is like slowly building and I hope this is just a cool way to do it. Let me know in the comments below. So I get the question sometimes like how did you get into programming? How did you get into CTFs? So I'm gonna go way back like way back like a kid and it's gonna be a lot of backstory but it's all gonna come together at the end I promise. When I was in elementary school I played a lot of Pokemon and I went to some event I think it was like Pokemon Rocks America like 2005 and I met this guy there who told me about this cool thing on the internet that was like a website, serabi.net and it had a forum that people could go online and chat and talk about stuff. Pokemon. It was Pokemon in this case and I thought that this was super cool. So I used the forum for a while and I got to visiting like all the website pages and then at one point I was like just a kid kind of curious and I asked my dad like how does this work? What is this made out of? How do you make a website? And he taught me HTML. So as a nine-year-old I'm like this is the coolest thing in the world like I have superpowers I can make whatever I want. I have this like vivid memory of me playing Breaking the Habit by Lincoln Park like over and over again just on repeat and I would be asking my dad like how do I make a link and I had to explain to me like this the a tag you know the anchor tag with the href attribute like over and over again. I don't know why that sticks with me. So I made a lot of stupid web pages and I showed them to my friends and it was all cool in a little bit but then I realized like man I want a forum too. So I found this thing called Proboards which at the time was just like okay the cool easy way to make a website forum and I wanted to design this site called chatwood.com. I didn't realize that this was some Lord of the Rings reference at the time. I didn't know. I wanted a community to just like ring people together I guess. I don't know I was a kid stupid kid I still am. So my dad showed me how to buy domain on GoDaddy set up like DNS name servers and get a website hosted. I linked to the Proboards forum and it was fun like it just sit on the internet and a couple of my friends and I would use it. And at some point the Proboards forum got like completely overrun with like hackers and like the bad kind like not the good kind. They would like purposely defraud it and just post a bunch of like pornography like gross and weird stuff. I remember there were a lot of horses and those are things that I like probably shouldn't have seen as a preteen but I mean whatever kids have the internet these days. So that thing like died like crashed and burned hard and I was like well Proboards sucks can I just make my own forum technology and that blew open the doors for better web development stuff like CSS, JavaScript, PHP, my SQL. So I would look these things up online and you know like W3 schools like the first result on Google whatever like second to stack overflow. And while I was reading about these languages I would see stuff that people would try to advise against like the bad design that may lead to like cross-site scripting or SQL injection stuff that would let hackers in. And I was like whoa that's kind of cool. I want to be a hacker but not like the bad ones that put porn on my website like the good ones the people that would like make things better or understand flaws so they could fix them. So I would research like cheesy stuff on Google you know like how to be a hacker and somehow I stumbled upon Eric S. Raymond's website and that was like accidentally finding the holy grail because it told me if I wanted to be a hacker then I needed to run Linux and that started the snowball. I read all about like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, the origin of Linux, the classic VI versus Emacs War and I got to installing Ubuntu with like Wooby the Windows Ubuntu installer. Is that thing even around anymore? So I got Linux installed and I learned all about Bash from Crystal Capinti or Metal X 1000 on YouTube and I would just watch YouTube videos and try and self-learn. I saw that Python was like practically installed on every version of Linux ever and it was like the cool new programming thing to learn. So I remember being in sixth grade and I had just moved into my new stepfather's house because my parents were getting divorced and it was just kind of a neat escape for me like I'd go on YouTube and I'd watch The New Boston. Now that is a channel that I am very jealous of. Bucky Roberts, like Reg Roberts, props to you dude. When I was learning Python, I felt like time would move slower. Like I was just engrossed and awe inspired by this cool programming language, like this new thing. And again, right, I'm just a middle school kid. I remember being in my mom's car, we were just driving somewhere and I had this weird random thought like out of the blue and I guess I was thinking back to the programming videos or something. And I remember I said out loud to my mom like, Oh, it all makes sense. Like programming makes sense because you can tell the difference between a function and a variable because a function has like parentheses and variables don't. That was my middle school epiphany. So I went into high school and I would try and learn more. Like I'd dabble with Java and C and C++. I remember I would just pick up a programming language or any programming language just because I wanted to know more like XML, Ruby, Pearl. I just wanted to be like in the culture. My high school didn't have any programming courses or really any technology classes at all. So it was totally something I did just on my own because it was my passion. I signed up to take the AP computer science exam without ever taking the AP course. And I got a five, like I aced it, but I'd never taken a computer science course like in my life. When I got to college, the school that I went to didn't really have a good outlet for programming at all either. There was no computer science major. There was no programming classes, at least until you got into like your second year here. And then they teach you MATLAB. But luckily, when I was a freshman, there was some weird advertisement going around for something called the cyber stakes competition. And it was an online game where you were presented with puzzles and you would try to solve them for points with some kind of programming or computer skill. It was like a qualifier thing where my school would just send the best people to the live competition later on in the year. And I played. I think I finished like fourth, but there were only like 20 people playing from my school. It really wasn't that big of a thing. So I got invited to go to the live competition. So I went to cyber stakes live and I met some of the guys from Platt Parliament opponent, Tyler Nicewander, David Bromley, who just now goes on to do Pico CTF, like big people in the capture the flag scene. And this was the first time that my school had came to this event or ever even heard of it. So we didn't really do that good, but it piqued my interest. So after the competition, I went up to them and asked, like, what is all this stuff? Like, how do I get good at this? And Tyler Nicewander himself just told me about CTF time, told me about Over the Wire and all these different war games and how to get better. And that opened the floodgates, man. I would try CTF, fail at it, read write ups, do it again. And this, like four years ago, is the first time I'm ever doing stuff with like git or virtual machines. So I'm drinking from a fire hose, but it was so cool. And now I'm on YouTube just looking at stuff from Live Overflow, Ginvale, Ipsak. So I've got one foot in the computer science scene and one foot in the cybersecurity scene. And those two things are like practically the same. Information technology, information assurance, they're all a slice of the same pie. They're all part of, like, doing something cool with computers. And the passion for that just comes from, like, the raw, genuine curiosity. Just being inquisitive to how does this work? Wanting to understand, like, why does it work that way? How can I make something do what it's meant to do? But at the same time, how can I make it do something it's not meant to do? So that's my story. I left out some of the parts of, like, me trying to make a bunch of video games, like using Adventure Maker with Visual Basic Script or Yo-Yo Games Game Maker. But that was a part of my life, too. Now I try and do a little bit of all that stuff. A lot of Python, a lot of Catch the Flag and a lot of fun. All right, the video's over. So hey, thanks for watching. I hope you guys like this style. Please do like, comment, subscribe, all the YouTube algorithm stuff. If you want to hang out with me and join a cool community of hackers and programmers, check out our Discord server link in the description. And if you're willing to support me, please check me out on Patreon. This is still weird.