Year So Far — Part 1

14 Jul 2025

What’s this about?

Oftentimes I get so immersed in what I do, one thing after the other, I forget to take a step back and notice what I’ve accomplished. It’s important to do this from time to time, so when I feel down about not doing enough in moments of downtime, I have something to look at and go, “No, I am doing my best.”

This is one such list, for what I’ve been up to this year till now. Here’s a glimpse into the life of Sheikh, halfway through 2025.

The List

[Part 1 of 3]

CELPIP Exam

Mid-January I took the CELPIP Exam in preparation for applying for my Post-Graduation Work Permit. It’s an English proficiency test comparable to IELTS, but the score band is up to 12 points, with 1:1 equivalence with the Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) scoring system. I passed with 12 points in Listening and Writing, and 11 points in Reading and Speaking. With these results, I applied for my PGWP soon after.

Global Game Jam

Last week of January I participated in the Global Game Jam for the 3rd time, but it was my first time doing it solo. Previously I had participated with friends, so it was quite a different experience. I had a lot of fun making a whole game from scratch in ~2.5 days, including the graphics.

I always wanted to make a game for some old retro console, and seeing this as my chance I did just that. I chose Gameboy as my target platform and GB Studio as my engine of choice. It’s a great engine that’s easy to get started with, and one of the best way to make games for the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color. Even considering that I made the graphics from scratch while working solo, the whole game was done way ahead of time, and I had plenty of room for going around and seeing what wonderful games everyone else was making. Also met some great people from Ubisoft Halifax who gave me valuable feedback on how I can make my game even better. That’s what I’m looking to work on, now that the pressure is off.

Try Bubble Blaster here: cybardev.itch.io/bubble-blaster

ShiftKey Cloud Foundations

Once a week through February, I attended the Cloud Foundations course by ShiftKey at Dalhousie. It was taught by Vansh Sood, who previously taught a course on GenAI, that I enjoyed. This course was a nice overview of how cloud fits into the software ecosystem, and the various providers and services available. It was also meant to help prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner foundational certification exam. As such, the course was mainly focused on AWS, but counterparts in Azure and GCP were discussed briefly as well.

I haven't taken the AWS exam yet. That's because I'm thinking of going straight to a more advanced certificate like Solutions Architect. Regardless, I'm sure the knowledge I've gained from this course will be helpful in my projects and beyond.

ShiftKey Practical Cybersecurity

Once a week through March, I attended the Practical Cybersecurity course by ShiftKey at Dalhousie. It was taught by Aman Bhalla, a fellow student, but one with quite a bit of industry experience through co-ops and internships. I like that they have students teach these courses. Makes them approachable and they also know what we need because they're currently going through the same things but are a few steps ahead. We went through topics like Information Security, Threat Analysis, Encryption, Data Protection principles, Cybersecurity Frameworks, Applications Security, Ethical Hacking, and Legal Frameworks for Cybersecurity.

I expected this course to be redundant due to another course I was doing at the time (started that one earlier), but this ended up accelerating my learning in that course.

More on the other course in the next part of this series…