At the beginning of the academic year, I received an email from Nottingham Trent University’s Development Society (DevSoc) inviting me to join the society and take part in a cryptography challenge. The challenge was called Project REvil and required the contestant to find 5 ‘flags’ and input them into a discord bot, if the flag was correct the clue for the next flag was given until all 5 were found. I had a slow start after overthinking the first challenge but after an intense afternoon and many cups of coffee I completed the challenges to secure third place overall.
This was a fun introduction to the society and computing, some of the challenges required knowledge of computing that I didn’t have and so as well as an interesting challenge it was also a learning experience.
Between October 15th and November 15th IBM hosted a competition based on mainframe computing. This was something I knew little about so I signed up and completed the basic tutorial levels. To assist in this competition DevSoc put on a 2-hour workshop based on mainframe computing, this was presented by a member of DevSoc who is currently on placement working in this field. It was interesting to learn about COBOL programming language and the current and potential future uses for mainframe computing.
