Portfolio

HomeLab/Self-Hosting

As a digital privacy and security enthusiast, I find myself searching for more ways to minimize my digital footprint/fingerprint by self-hosting services and storing data on my own systems. In order to accomplish this, I have a small server rack with systems ranging from network appliances, to SBCs, to full- blown computer systems that are dedicated to keeping my data in my hands. Some of the technologies and services include Proxmox, Portainer, Docker, Pi-Hole, and TrueNAS.

NSA Codebreaker Challenge

I participated in the NSA's CodeBreaker Challenge where I had the opportunity to develop and improve my skills such as reverse-engineering, network forensics, and code analysis skills. Additionally, this challenge introduced me to Ghidra, a suite of software reverse engineering tools developed by the NSA.

GM/SAE AUTODRIVE CHALLENGE II

 Texas A&M - The 12th Unmanned Team (Spring 2021)

General Motors and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) sponsor and organize AutoDrive challenge II (ADC II), a four-year competition (2021-2025) that allows university teams to develop and demonstrate their own autonomous vehicle. The 12th Unmanned Team is Texas A&M's response to the challenge. Our team was responsible for designing a lane boundary detection system that would be integrated into the Robot Operating System

Machine Learning: CV

For my Machine Learning course (CSCE 421) course at Texas A&M University, I was tasked to create, compare, and write an IEEE-styled paper on different machine learning models when given dataset imbalances (step and linear). These models were to perform computer vision and tasked to correctly identify hand-written numbers after being trained with a biased dataset. The models tested in my report were the Convolutional Neural Network, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression. 

WHOLE-HOME NETWORKING 

My parents decided to renovate and remodel the house and tasked me with determining the networking equipment and setup needed to support their current and future needs. Their needs spanned from general internet connectivity to surveillance to IoT devices. I decided to use Ubiquiti's UniFi product line to ensure all the equipment works together, where I can set and forget, yet remotely manage and diagnose issues in the event they encounter any. To accomplish this, I planned around the new floor plans to determine the location of all of the equipment, optimal runs to make, and the technologies to incorporate.

VPN SERVER

I currently own a VPS in a data center to host a WireGuard VPN Server. This allows me to maintain a static external IP and port forward through my apartment's network. I had to learn a lot of things like IPTables and port redirection in order to achieve this. At the moment, I am hosting and forwarding a service from my apartment through the VPN.

WEBSITE FROM SCRATCH

I designed and created an entire website from scratch using only Visual Studio and W3Schools. Despite the many available templates on the internet that add pop to the website, I chose to challenge my abilities to make a website without any tools. The overall website design was inspired by the official Texas A&M University website.

CUSTOM COMPUTER SYSTEMS

Having built over 8 custom computer systems, including a donation system, I am relatively confident in my ability around consumer-grade computer components. It is a joy for me to keep up to date with the latest news on components, so I always do my best to plan, future-proof, and cost-optimize all my builds. Do note that these systems are not always mine, some are requests for friends and gifts for others. Nevertheless, I always put my best foot forward as if it were my own money and computer.

RASPBERRY PI IP-CCTV

As a privacy and security enthusiast, I seek knowledge that will improve my own life. Using a PoE IP-Camera, Raspberry Pi 3, and an Open-Source OS (MotionEyeOS), I have active surveillance in my apartment to monitor and record physical access. I plan to further expand this system with secure off-site backups and redundancies in the future.

WHOLE-HOME PERSISTENT VPN TUNNEL

Another in-home security implementation I added was a Whole-Home VPN connection. By flashing a custom firmware (DD-WRT) on my router, I set up a persistent VPN connection to secure my traffic from my apartment complex and its ISP. You never know who is snooping on the network, so it’s always “rather safe than sorry.”

GAME SERVERS

I ran six fully configured, public game servers for the game Garry’s Mod from 2013-2017. I learned that modularity is essential in order to push updates and write game mods. If you didn’t structure it to be modular, it was a nightmare to keep up to date. These servers were hosted from my home 24/7, which taught me the fundamentals of networking. Alongside the servers was a community website that was a forums page and subpages that contained FAQs and rules pages for each server.

WEB DESIGNER

I enjoy some light web designing from time to time so it’s not a surprise that I have designed, deployed, and maintained two business websites. I’ve created many websites in the past both from scratch and using builders, but many have been depreciated. I was also an Adobe Certified Associate in Web Authoring Using Adobe Dreamweaver from 2017 to 2020.

Hackathon: TAMUHACK 2020

Project: Accident Analysis Algorithm

With the increasing frequency of drivers, the roads are becoming a more dangerous place, especially on unfamiliar routes. For that reason, our team decided to use the computational power of today to perform statistical analysis and machine learning to predict the severity of accidents prone to an area. We wanted to help reassure drivers by providing them with areas to be aware of without overwhelming them with raw data. The goal of this algorithm is to interpret historical accident data and predict the severity of accidents that may occur in the area based on the attributes that are heavily correlated. This information can be used to suggest avoiding areas during route planning and could allow the insurance company to make a preliminary estimate based on the accident location. Throughout this project, we utilized Google’s AutoML and Flask.

Hackathon: TAMUMAKE 2020

Project: EyeGotYou

With the increasing amount of snooping people and frequent unauthorized access to systems, computers are becoming humans’ weak point. We store tons of data and use our computers for sensitive applications frequently, so it’s about time we start securing it whenever we can. I wanted to make an application that was capable of being quickly deployed and lightweight enough for any machine from businesses to personal systems. Not only that, but this application also pauses and resumes media according to the user’s presence. This feature can also be stripped from this application to assist people who may struggle to use peripherals to allow ease of media controls. This application uses the webcam on computers to identify human eyes to recognize when a user is currently at their workspace. Upon leaving this space, the application will trigger a command to lock the workspace after a configurable threshold of time. Alongside the security feature, this application comes with accessibility in mind with presence-based media controls. Throughout this project, I used Python, OpenCV library, Cascades, and Pynput.