Ctfs has been a part of my life for several years, and last December I decided to play my last ctf. I just wanted to make a post reflecting a bit on my ctf journey, talk a bit about why I’m not playing ctfs anymore and update what I’ve been up to.
My ctf journey
I started learning pwn in 2020 during covid through liveoverflow’s binexp playlist, and slowly started playing ctfs. I still remember my first ctf being HITCON 2020, and that I was completely clueless on how to solve the challenges.
Over the years, I learned more and more about computers and hacking, and got better and better at ctfs. I’ve mostly played solo, but I always wanted to join a ctf team and actually try to compete for the top spots, so I started looking for a team in the ctf discord server. I was approached by the leader of thehackerscrew, which was a team that I often saw in the leaderboards, so I was really excited and happy when I got his message, and later on joined the team!
Ever since the start of my ctf journey, I’ve always dreamed of going to an international onsite final, and meeting all the cracked players from different countries. Which is why I was so ecstatic when I got the chance to go to codegate finals, my first ever international finals. It just felt so surreal travelling all the way to Korea on a sponsored flight, and hacking in a hall full of hackers.
Later that year, I heard about the ASEAN Cyber Shield ctf from one of my teammates from thehackerscrew. I was really interested in it, so I kept asking around to learn more, which is how I eventually got into contact with people from M53, Malaysia’s top ctf team at the time, and also with Mr Yap. Sadly I couldn’t participate in ACS that year, but it was because of it I started talking to people from the local cybersecurity scene, and was getting more involved in the community. I started going to sherpa meetups, playing in local ctfs, and was just making tons of Malaysian hacker friends.
Thankfully, I had the opportunity to participate in ACS the following year. This was my last ctf, and I think it was a pretty good ending to my ctf journey. We managed to get 3rd, making it the first ctf I managed to get on the podium. Plus, we were representing Malaysia, so it was extra cool.
Also, 2 of the pwn challs of the ctf were made from my friend ainsetin/st4rlight, who was one of the first ctf friends I made!
I met a lot of awesome people from all around the world playing ctfs, and I’m very grateful for everyone of you all for making my ctf journey so memorable. I’m also very thankful to thehackerscrew for giving me a chance to compete at an international level, and to all my teammates for teaching me so much about hacking, and being so fun to hangout with. And of course, I’m deeply grateful to the Malaysian hacking community, for giving me so many different opportunities, and for treating me so kindly.
I hope I have the chance to meet up with you all again in the future.
Ctfs taught me a lot about hacking, and gave me a lot of computer skills. I had a lot of fun pwning during late nights, and got a lot of really satisfying moments when I succesfully popped shells after being stuck. But ctfs and hacking has always just been a hobby, it’s not something that I wanted to do for a living, it was just something that I really loved to do, which is why I’ve decided to quit playing ctfs.
I want to dedicate most of my time doing what I actually want to do, which is robotics.
What I’ve been doing
In 2023, after I moved to a new school for A-Levels, I joined the school’s Robocon team which competes in the annual Robocon Malaysia competition (winner gets to represent Malaysia for the actual ABU Robocon).
Unfortunately, Robocon Malaysia 2024 was cancelled, as the competition was becoming biennial instead of being annual. However, UTM stepped up and organised a friendly match between schools instead.
Our team still lost some motivation after the official competition was cancelled, and was very last minute in making our robots for the friendly match. Thus, our robot didn’t perform too well, but the team learned a lot from the competition.
I didn’t work on the robot much before the competition. But as the robots still had to be used after for Open Day, I rewired one of the robots pretty much completely to organise it, and in the process I learned a lot about power management, basic wiring & connections, and more.
it was still very messy, but i learned a lot
After seeing how good the other team’s robots were during the friendly match, and how skilled other people were, I was really motivated to get better and put more time into robotics.
Fast forward to Robocon Malaysia 2025, we improved a lot, and our robots performed a lot better.
Our team was definetely capable of reaching the quarter finals, but we were placed in arguably the toughest group of the competition, and didn’t manage to make it.
Our robot 1 were having some problems during the competition days, but after it was fixed, it managed to make 6/9 three pointers (after moving) during testing, and was looking very promising: robot 1 shooting vid
Unfortunately, our robot 1 never fully fulfilled its potential, as it couldn’t dribble effectively.
Thankfully, our robot 2 worked pretty well, and even managed to score a bucket (after the game ended): livestream link
If you want to see more of our robots, my team leader made a short highlights video: here
I wanted to work on more mechanical tasks this year, so I worked on designing the double flywheel shooter our robot 1 used with my teammate. We prototyped and tested multiple different designs, before coming to this design in the end:
irl view:
I learned a lot about mechanical design, fabrication, and control theory through this.
I mainly only worked on the shooter this year, and helped write a little bit of software here and there. The rest of the robot of course, were built by my amazing teammates. I really loved working together with them, and I learned a huge ton about robotics from them. I’m very proud of what we’ve all built together.
A lot of them are leaving since they’re going into their last year of uni, and I’m also leaving since I already graduated A-Levels and is no longer studying at the school. I believe we all have improved a lot and gained a lot of experience through robocon, and I’m very grateful for having such great teammates to work and hangout with.
What’s next
Well, I currently have quite a bit of time on my hands, so I’m gonna be building some cool robotics projects, and maybe share them on here and twitter. Stay tuned.