Now that classes are over for the semester, I decided to resume work on a project I’ve been putting off for a while. ProxyAuth is a passwordless authentication module that allows lazy people like me to access their machine without inputting their passwords. It authenticates the user if their hardware authenticator (i.e. a smartphone) is close to the machine via Bluetooth connection. Currently, the implementation is not convenient and there are a lot of areas that need to be worked on such as the security of the product.

This is a copy of my reflection report I submitted for Professional Experience Year (PEY), a 16 month internship at a company. The contents of this post does not enclosed any confidential information (verified by a manager) and all names will be redacted since this is the internet. Please note that some of the information are outdated and my experience may not reflect what others experience. I did my internship in 2018-2019 before the pandemic when work was not remote.

Recently I started to read C & C++ Under the Hood. As the name implies, the book explores deeper in what goes on in the assembly level using LCC machine language (a simple machine language for educational purposes). One of the fact the author points out is that global variables are initialized to 0. While this should have been common knowledge, I was shocked because I always thought the behavior of an uninitialized variable is garbage (i.e. behavior is undefined and hence can be anything). To my defense, I actively avoid writing code that involves a global variable for various reasons (though mainly it was due to my Highschool teacher telling me to never use global variables).

I have just finished my first Physics lab in many years and it was quite more time-consuming than I initially thought. This post will go over briefly a few tex commands I found useful when writing my lab along with a link to my Physics template that’ll be subject to change as I write more and more labs.

I recently decided it is about time to start using a VPN for personal use. Although there are many reasons for one to use a VPN such as masking your IP address and location, I only want to get a VPN to encrypt my traffic on Public Wifi. VPN can be great to bypass region locking, but I rarely ever have any issues with this. The VPN provider I chose is NordVPN for no particular reason other than there was a summer deal and is a strong choice for Linux users.

I have been pondering lately on how to respond when the interviewer asks if you have any questions for them. After much pondering, I have compiled a small list of questions to ask for my next interview.