Time flies. I can't believe the year is almost over. The fact that there's barely 6 months left before graduation scares me.

January to April

• Mostly just coursework. I let myself slip a little and didn't do much work. Made a cool music player integrated with yt-dlp for Android. Unfortunately, I never managed to switch to Android and thus never bothered implementing all the features I wanted. Maybe next year...

May

• Kubernetes. I regret this. It did solve my problem of wanting docker-compose but with storage replication and easily moving between nodes. However, the amount of time I've spent debugging various issues since would've been enough to DIY my own system less complex and thus more reliable for my specific needs. It's in a stable state now though, so hopefully I won't have to touch it much again.
• I got into AI again. I tried out all of the popular agents such as Codex, Gemini CLI, Goose, and OpenCode. Codex sucked because OpenAI models are dumb. Gemini had my favorite degree of developer control, but I can't figure out how to pay Google. They keep declining my debit cards. Goose was buggy. OpenCode has good integration with all the providers but lacks control (all changes are auto-approved). Gave up and went back to CopilotChat.nvim.
• Slacked off.

Late May to August

• Internship at Huawei
• Learned a ton about Time Travel Debugging, graphs, and eBPF.
• Thought about supply chain security but was shut down for being too difficult to implement due to company politics.
• After the internship, I traveled the Netherlands and Belgium

September

• Internship at the University of Cambridge. Continued research on Apple's location services which I started working on all the way back in May 2024. GitHub
• Also messed with iOS development for data collection, namely creating a Charles Proxy-like app to collect Apple analytics data locally without privacy concerns of an mitmproxy VPN.

October-December

• More coursework. Learned React Server Components. Horrible stuff. 10.0 CVE dropped the day after submission.
• Failed a bunch of job interviews.
• Realized that I might end up unemployed after university.
• Joked about having a startup idea (the thing that got rejected by Huawei)
• You know what? There might actually be a higher chance of making a successful startup than getting a job.
• Started doing market research and designing the product from the business perspective. Hey, if you're reading this and interested in stopping supply chain attacks like xz-utils or Shai-Hulud the NPM worm, email me and maybe we can have a chat.
• But of course, I'd still rather be employed and work on my projects part-time & open source rather than being worried about monetization.

2026. The Plan

Uhh, pray.

Applied Software Engineering at Cardiff University actually has one major benefit: you get complete control over your final year project and dissertation. This means that I get to work on a startup without violating the terms of my student visa and graduate with an MVP in hand. From there, I need to run around the UK looking for pre-seed funding. I don't need much, just enough to afford basic rent, food, and internet for a year while I actually get customers and build revenue. I'd like to bootstrap but unfortunately all the money I've earned over the years has gone to university. $57k (£46k back in 2023) from security bounties + £14k from internships + £10k from freelancing while tuition cost £70k over the 3 years means I'll be graduating with around negative £16k in the bank from rent and living expenses.

So yeah, things are looking a bit grim.