My name is Ryan Haas, I'm from Lititz, PA and have a love for computer science. I went to Warwick High School where I graduated in 2018 as a member of the national honor society. I began my work towards a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science at Millersville University in the fall of 2018. Since then I have put myself on track to graduate in only 3 years while working in the university's IT department. I have strong interests in computer programming, information technology, and cyber security/network administration.

For a long time I didn't have much more of an interest in computers than anyone else did. My extent that I used them was essentially playing games on Windows XP and handheld gaming devices like Game Boys.

As I became more exposed to TV and media however, I became really interested in the depiction of coding/hacking (I know it's bogus but it got me interested). I kept thinking to myself that that would be a really cool thing to learn how to do. My only problem was that I had no idea where to start; I more or less knew that most of it was available to learn online but it was just too much information all at once. Thankfully I found some footing and a starting point in middle school.

In 8th grade middle school one of my friends who had gotten into the gifted program was working on a project where he was building websites. As a result he would show simple stuff mostly using the "Inspect Element" tool in browsers but it got me super interested because it was finally a starting point for me. I spent the next several months teaching myself some basic web development, primarily HTML and CSS. I had spent time trying to learn JavaScript but I couldn't wrap my head around the basics of programming at all; for whatever reason even a basic if statement just didn't make sense to me for a really long time. Over a family vacation I finally just threw myself at JavaScript and spent a lot of time practicing writing code even if I didn't fully understand what I was writing. On our way home suddenly something just clicked and things started to make sense. Ever since that day, which I'm not sure I'll forget, I've not had much challenge in learning new languages or programming concepts.

After middle school I was lucky enough to go to a high school that actually had a decent number of programming related courses, both for web dev and software. My freshman year I was only able to take the web development courses so that consumed my first year. Much of what I learned wasn't too new compared to what I had already taught myself in middle school, but it did help improve some of design choices and style. Towards the end I did learn some more JavaScript and how to effectively use some jQuery, but that was basically it. It did at least help hone in some of my web development skills and is probably one of the few reasons I remember how to do anything. These high school web dev courses also introduced me to working with a team and trying to bring to life what a client wants. While I'm still not a big fan of web development, these courses definitely helped me nail down some of the basics of coding.

In my second year of high school I was finally able to take some actual programming courses where I got to learn Java and object oriented programming. This is what finally gave me the starting point I needed to begin to program and learn on my own. I was fortunate enough to learn how to problem solve, program solutions, and figure out some core programming principles before I was even close to going to college. With these courses I learned how to create various programs and learned a lot of GUI work using Java Swing. By the end of taking both of the programming courses I was able to make my Bouncy Ball game. Using the knowledge I learned from those programming courses I was able to create other games like my much cleaner 2D platformer. I was also able to begin teaching myself other programming languages, such as Python and some C++.

When I got to MU I began looking for computer science related clubs because I wanted to be more active in extracurriculars than I was in high school. One that stuck out to me during orientation was the Cyber Defense Organization. I joined the club that Fall of 2018 and immediately began learning a lot of new information quickly. I had already started learning to use Linux but with the club I became familiar with the OS very quickly and really enjoyed just how much you could do with it. Over the course of a few months I had a general understanding of how services worked and was going through guides on how to protect these services and make them more secure.

I got some of my first experiences with actually defending a network when we took part in the 2018 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC). This is a competition with multiple qualifiers. We successfully made it to regionals where we were able to go to John Hopkins university and spend multiple hours a day defending a preconstructed network from industry hackers. We tied for 6th place out of 8 teams from the Mid-Atlantic region. This is where I really got a taste for cyber security as the challenge and experience was a total blast where you learn a lot of information very quickly.

Around this time I also became the treasurer of the club and begun taking on more responsibilites within the club. The club had kind of become disorganized over the years of its existence so as I began looking into the our lab network (the Adam's Lab) I realized just how much room there was for improvement. Everything started when I needed to get into a Cisco ASA 5505 to check for a possible IP whitelist on the network preventing some devices from functioning properly. I realized the password to said ASA was unknown and not recorded anywhere. This is what kicked off my new objective to begin revitalizing the club with our new club president. That Fall of 2019 we began with optimizing the layout of the room in our lab and building brand new computers for half of the stations in the lab (the most we had the budget for). Also during this time I began tearing apart the Adam's Network and rebuilding and documenting everything in an attempt to futureproof the club and prevent the incredible headaches that I was facing as I tried to figure out the total mess of the network. By Winter of 2019 we held re-elections for vice president as our previous VP was graduating. Since I was one of the most active and was playing such an instrumental part in the revamp of the network and club I took the position. Since taking the position I have worked with the new treasurer to obtain a budget for us to upgrade the rest of the lab computers as well as upgrade our server; this is something that long needed done as the server we have is a decade old at minimum and has not been kept up well. I, and my other officers in the club, have a lot of plans for the club assuming all can go well with the current coronavirus pandemic. I'd like to create and host a website for the club to get new members interested as well as recruit new members, we'd like to setup an active directory for active members, and it'd be really great if we could setup some kind of system using Docker or Kubernetes where we can deploy vulnerable VMs for user's to patch and defend (like our own personal CCDC). The club has really gotten me interested in cyber security and network management and has opened up some career paths that I may consider besides just going into programming. I spent over 12 hours the one day in the lab reorganizing the server room from scratch and it was a lot of fun, and I'm seriously considering trying to get a job in a similar career path. My goal is to the leave the club in a much stronger state than what we inherited and allow generations of club members to get the most they can out of it, as there really is a lot of opportunity to learn.