Cyber Member Spotlight — Bryce Tsuyuki
Introducing Member Spotlights! Learn more about ACM Cyber member Bryce Tsuyuki about his journey to cybersecurity, his long-term goals, and some fun facts!
What’s your major? What drew you to this field?
Major: Computer Science
I’ve been interested in computers since I was a kid and I’ve been more and more interested in how they work and how I can make them work. I did some computer science classes in high school and also some cybersecurity extracurriculars too (more on that later) and that drew me into this field.
How did you become interested in cybersecurity?
I actually got dragged into the cybersecurity field in the beginning of my high school years unintentionally, in fact. For context, one important thing to know about me is that I have a library of various obscure (and pointless) virtual machines/emulated machines. Every single version of Apple’s macOS (and before that OSX, Mac OS X, and Mac OS)? Yep. Every single version of Windows? Yep. Obscure OSes like ReactOS, NEXTSTEP/OpenStep, and Haiku? I’ve got it. So I was a brand new freshman at my high school and there was a competition team starting up called CyberPatriot. Now back then I had no idea what CyberPatriot was or what cybersecurity was apart from that setting passwords and 2-factor authentication was a good thing, but they were offering free Windows licenses for training. And I went “ooh free software” and signed on as one of the first team members. One thing led to another, my team placed first in the Gold Tier Regionals level competition our first year and eventually made it to 20th nationally, I became President of the CyberPatriot team at my school for two years, I developed some workstation security curricula to match the competition, and I started networking with other cyber educators in the area (including my eventual supervisor at the Bay Area Cyber League in San Jose). So I suppose it’s easy (and kind of funny) to say that free Windows licenses got me into a rabbit hole with CyberPatriot and cybersecurity in general, and I still think that was a good thing to this day.
What are some cool cybersecurity related/other projects you’ve undertaken? Or have there been any fun CTFs you’ve participated in recently?
I played in the NCL fall game this year and placed 74th on the individual rankings, and the team I competed with (consisting of myself and some of my former coworkers at the Bay Area Cyber League) placed 37th in the team game. I also spent a couple summers working for an organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Bay Area Cyber League (https://www.baycyber.net/) on their CTFs and summer camp program for middle and high schoolers. I was an instructor for them for a summer and we ran a custom CTF competition as the capstone each week to our week-long summer camp program.
Cyber education (and computing education overall) continues to be something that interests me deeply, because it’s so gratifying to see people learn to use computers for more than YouTube and Facebook. The possibilities are limitless.
What are your long term goals (if any) ?
I’m angling to work as a DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Systems Engineer, or Site Reliability Engineer (there are so many job titles for folks that do mostly similar things). I’m really interested in emerging technologies like Infrastructure-as-Code, container orchestration, and the like, bringing a lot of these best practices from software engineering to operations.
Ideally, I’d like to bring some of my security expertise to play too (since all of these deployments need to be properly secured and such), and there are emerging fields like DevSecOps, automating things like vulnerability scanning, dependency scanning, and the like in order to bring more of these best practices from software engineering over to more of the operations side of the house.
What’s a fun fact about you :D
I’m a published author! I wrote a short fiction book in middle school as part of an assignment where we had to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Excuse the writing quality, it’s absolute garbage even considering that I was in middle school at the time. I was part of the Youth program and part of that included getting my final novel self-published! Find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Up-Out-Bryce-Tsuyuki-ebook/dp/B07NPGRSPS
What are your hobbies / what do you like to do in your free time?
I’m a really big junkie for consumer electronics and such. I probably spend way too much time reading consumer electronics news (and reading the news in general). I have a whole bunch of niche interests ranging from mechanical keyboards to ergonomic office chairs (office chairs are better than gaming chairs, change my mind). I actually have a byte slide at acmurl.com/byteslides that lists out all of my various obscure (and not so obscure) hobbies and interests, and they range from Star Wars to the MCU to the aforementioned multiple virtual machines.
I also spend a ton of time just hanging around the various ACM servers, both for all of the communities and for ACM General. You can probably catch me in the voice channels at some point or if not I’ll definitely be in (most) of the text channels. Maybe I’m too active in there, but oh well it’s a nice diversion these days and all the people I’ve gotten to know are great people.
And finally, do you have any advice/something to say to the readers?
The one thing that I’d encourage everyone to do is get involved in everything ACM Cyber and ACM have to offer. Take a moment and explore the different communities and you might just learn something new. I never knew a thing about entrepreneurship till I took a look at ACM Innovate and I learned a whole bunch of interesting stuff there. The beauty of ACM communities system is really that there’s so much to explore, so get out of your comfort zone and try something new, even if it’s just for a day!
