Welcome to Scripthaus. Name and subtitle subject to change upon determining which project I’ll be working on. The “purple team” subtitle refers to playing both the blue and red team. If my team is able to get our ideal project, we’ll be working on the Website Security Research Project. But we’ll revisit the topic of projects shortly, let me introduce myself!
My name is Nathaniel Luginbill, and I go by Nate. This blog was prompted by my Capstone course, and I’ll be documenting my progress on my capstone project here. There’s an element of mystery as to what this blog will actually end up covering, since the project has not been determined yet.
Computers have interested me and been important to me for as long as I’ve been forming memories. While I may have gotten mostly entertainment value out of them as a kid, the science and mechanics of how they operated began to interest me once I started fixing and building them with my friends. And of course the things you can achieve with software are far-reaching, so I was also in some awe at the powers of a coder. I have a degree in Philosophy, so when I began exploring coding I enjoyed its logical nature and its precise syntaxes. That genuine interest, and economical prudence, led me to pursuing my CS degree.
Currently I’m working for a health insurance company as a Java Developer. I work on their procedure preauthorization platform. I’m learning an incredible amount. It’s been hugely beneficial learning to tackle large codebases, and working on a large team. It’s probably not the field I want to stick with, and so I’m hoping to use this class as an opportunity to develop some specialization.
Whether that specialization ends up pertaining to security, or AI, either would be interesting to me. I have a keen interest in both of this topics, and I’ve dabbled with both. I’ve used the OpenAI api in other projects. It was a modest project to be sure, but a project nonetheless! I created an html quiz game where the questions, and four possible answers, were AI-generated. The game pulled news stories from NewsAPI and fed them to OpenAI API. I’ve also dipped my toes into security. For instance, when I was learning php (for some reason!? — oh, I guess because of the very cms platform I’m using for this blog right now!) I hacked my own website with SQL injection. Fairly reminiscent of one of the projects I hope to work on!
The projects that I put my lot in for pertain to these interests. I’ve got a good friend that I’ve gone through this whole program with, and we are going to be working together (notwithstanding the disclaimer about no guarantees of team composition). So we chose all of the projects touching on security and AI, or machine learning algorithms. E.g., Website Security Research Project, AI Coder, Algorithmic trading, AI Investor Match, and Malware Research.
The Website Security Research Project seems like a great way to dive in to the security world. What better way to learn to defend from threats than by knowing how the attacks function intimately. Malware Research seems like it could be a steep learning curve, which can be a good thing. I’ve always wanted a “zoo” of malware on VMs to experiment with. AI Coder’s project description made me laugh when I read it, and I think it would be a whole lot of fun to see how much of the coding process we could automate. Well, I’m sure we could automate all of it; the results would be the interesting part. The Algorithmic Project would involve working with a team that includes an experienced AI engineer. That seems like a valuable experience, and AI is a field I’d love to break into. If I need to put in some extra hours doing the preliminary learning, then so be it!
Anyway, I’ll leave you with some more biographical and we’ll call it good until next time! Besides having a degree in philosophy, I’ve spent a good amount of time playing music in live bands. I’ve recorded on maybe 7 or 8 EPs/LPs playing guitar, bass, drums, and singing. I’ve toured the Midwest, east coast, and I’ve played at Oktoberfest festivals in Freising. Besides music I’m into reading and video games. Right now I’m reading Moby Dick. I like literature and philosophy. I’m also a big fan of sci-fi. Love the classics like Asimov and Clarke, but LOVE love Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Regards video games, I’m very into roguelikes (FTL, Slay the Spire), and also recently started playing racing sims.
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