My August Journey into Early September

August blurred into early September like a messy git merge — messy, satisfying, and full of small victories. Between school, side projects, and weird security freakouts, I learned a lot and broke a lot (mostly intentionally).

What I built and broke

  • Mini CDN & URL shortener: Turning my laptop into a tiny edge network felt absurd and powerful. Caching rules, redirects, and a fair bit of Cloudflare tinkering later, I had something that actually served traffic without falling over.
  • Status dashboard (React + TypeScript): A clean UI that checks all my apps and displays whether they’re online. It’s the kind of small thing that saves hours when something inevitably dies at 2 AM.

The PGP saga (key rotation, signing, survival)

Short version: I rotated my PGP keys, re-signed commits, and survived the chaos.

Longer: I realized some of my old keys had too much history and not enough hygiene, so I generated brand-new keys (ed25519), moved my Git commit signing over, and exported the new public key to GitHub. That involved updating gpg configs, re-exporting armored keys, and making sure CI and remote systems accepted the new signing key. It was a pain for five minutes and a huge privacy win forever.

Takeaways:

  • Rotate keys periodically — it’s not paranoia, it’s responsible maintenance.
  • Test new keys on a personal repo before switching everything.
  • Keep an off-site backup of the new secret key (encrypted, of course).

The Auditorium Demos — Cooking, Not Burning

For the school auditorium, I cooked up a few live demos: lightweight frontend micro-apps, an interactive status board, and even a visual skit of a Linux boot sequence that ended with the punchline:

“I said let him cook.”

It wasn’t just code on a projector — I also wove in a team intro sequence (because no good show runs solo) and gave a nod to Jun Woo Sung, the kind of reference that adds flavor and helps me farm more aura than I thought possible.

The goal was simple: show every house that I’m not just another average kid, but someone who knows more than all of them combined — raised to the exponent.

Lessons learned

  • Security tools only protect you if you use them right. Rotating keys is tiny work with big returns.
  • Ship early: a messy live demo that actually runs is infinitely better than a perfect demo that never sees the light.
  • Balancing CAIE study + projects is a juggling act — but the projects also make studying less monotonous.

What’s next

Polish the demos, stabilize the URL shortener (with a polite redirect interstitial), and get the portfolio site into a presentable state. Also: more key hygiene and better backups. By October I want the projects to be shareable links, not just local things.