MonkeHacks #78

Hobbies, Startup, Conveniences

Author

Monke
September 23, 2025

MonkeHacks #78

It’s been a busy, busy week as usual. The Google LHE (Mexico) started this week so I’ve been collaborating with Busfactor, who is a fantastic hacker. We’ve been having a successful event so far. I’ve been seeing friends and such as well so my evenings have been pleasantly social. I had my first guitar lesson this week, and I really enjoyed it. I’m determined to master this instrument. I had my first casual football game as well and had a stunning realisation that I was, in fact, horribly unfit at aerobic exercise. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience though, so I’ll be aiming to play again this week or next week.

A rainbow over Edinburgh.

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

  • Roy Davis, who led the Zoom bug bounty program for years, has passed away this week after battling ALS for the last several years. Roy led my first ever LHE - H1-702 in Las Vegas in 2022, which had a significant influence on my bug bounty career. Thank you, Roy. Roy was a tremendous figure in the infosec community and his work will not be forgotten. If you knew Roy personally, please take some time to memorialise him in Rest In Code.

  • I finally thought of a startup idea, so I’ve started working on that. Given my current time constraints, this is something I’ll work further on after the LHE. I’m not going to announce anything more about it until I’m ready. It’s not AI-related.

  • This has been a long time coming. Over the last year or two, I’ve had my mind set on creating a startup. I didn’t have an idea, so instead I spent a lot of time gradually gathering the skillset to build a company once I had an idea that spoke to me.

  • In this manner, I sent off a Y Combinator application with Mikey96 last year that ended in nothing, but the YC process really helped me in that it taught me what’s actually important in a company - what is necessary for a company to be successful. I’ve been working on projects here and there, to be able to develop full-stack - Caido plugins to learn Typescript, building automation to learn how to create scalable backend systems. I’ve consumed a lot of podcast episodes and blogs around business and learned from friends currently running successful companies. I’ve achieved a successful work-life balance that gives me ample amounts of time to dedicate to building a startup.

  • So, I finally feel that it’s time for me to take the next step and start building something awesome. Wish me luck and stay tuned!

  • A few issues ago, I tried moving to GrapheneOS. This experiment was successful at the beginning, but gradually it began to obstruct my efficiency. So, I’ve decided to scale back my privacy efforts to a middleground - I’m returning to iOS for my daily routine (I bought an iPhone Air this week, which is an absolutely fantastic phone - it’s really, really light!) and I’m keeping a store of my data offline to ensure that I retain control over it. There’s a middleground here between convenience and control, that I’m striving to reach. I can reuse my other phone running GrapheneOS for bug bounty research so it’s not a waste by any means.

  • And the last piece of big news - I’m finally adopting a cat soon! More on this next week :)

Reading List

I didn’t have too much time to read in the past week, but given that I’m travelling to Portugal on Wednesday for HackAIcon, I’ll add to those page counters this week.

  • Currently:

    • Fiction:

      • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (130/600 pages)

      • Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

    • Non-Fiction:

      • A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel (150/300 pages)

      • How The World Made The West by Josephine Crawley Quinn (180/400 pages)

  • Next on the list:

    • Fiction: Mort by Terry Pratchett

    • Non-Fiction: Day Zero to Zero Day by Eugene Lim (SpaceRaccoon)

Resources