Goodbye Sophomore Year: A Year of Shipping Products, Winning Hackathons, and Building Community
As we officially bid farewell to Level 2 (sophomore year) and step into Level 3 in Cybersecurity & AI at Horus University... let me take you through what a full year of locking myself in a "cave" looked like: non-stop experiments, intense hackathon pressure, shipped products, and hard-earned certifications.
1. Activities & Community Leadership
• Founding ICPC HUE: At the start of the year, I co-founded Horus University's first competitive programming community, ICPC HUE. We built the training curriculum from scratch, coached hundreds of students, and qualified 8 teams for the Egyptian Collegiate Programming Contest (ECPC) qualifications.
• Hosting DCC Contest: We brought competitive programming to our campus by hosting the DCC programming contest at the Faculty of AI under the organization of ACPC Club Damietta University, welcoming 36+ teams from 5 universities.
• Tech Creator on LinkedIn: A whole year of documenting engineering builds, open-source architectures, and project breakdowns—crossing +170,000 impressions on LinkedIn!
2. Hackathons (3x National Wins) 🏆
We took home 3 national podium finishes across Egypt:
• 🥉 3rd Place at the Sustainable Innovation National Summit in Tanta (competing as Level 1 freshmen against 20+ universities nationwide!) with Zero Threat.
• 🥈 2nd Place at the Google Developers Group (GDG Delta) Hackathon out of 600+ developers and 122 teams with SAST.TECH.
• 🥉 3rd Place at the LUXSAI AI Hackathon in Luxor (after an unforgettable 17-hour train ride 💀) with SAST.TECH.
• Competed in the official ECPC 2026 Contestant qualifications.
*(I wasn't alone in these wins—I built alongside Abdelrahman Mohsen in all of them, and Khaled Suleiman at GDG Delta).*
Embracing Failure as Part of the Equation:
Not everything was a win. We applied to the Kafr El-Sheikh and Damietta hackathons and were rejected without feedback. I also participated in international global hackathons like BuildAnything, Reddit, Band.ai, and Sui—and didn't win, largely because I tried to carry everything as a solo builder. Those setbacks taught me more about team balance and product scope than any easy win ever could.
3. Training & Professional Certifications 🎓
• Information Technology Institute (ITI): Completed Level 1 in Machine Learning & AI Engineering (mastering Pandas, mathematics, applied ML, and building SpaceWorth.site), and currently progressing through Level 2.
• NVIDIA DLI Certificate of Competency: *Building RAG Agents with LLMs* (vector databases, stateful memory agents, and microservice architectures).
• Academic Honors: Received the Faculty of Artificial Intelligence Excellence Honor 3 times from Horus University.
• SaaS Strategy Training: Completed hands-on marketing, personal branding, and SaaS product strategy at AZ Tech Solutions with Eng. Akram Zeyada.
4. Shipped Products & Code 💻
• Verdict.run: My first comprehensive full-stack product. A Codeforces mirror that transforms classic problem pages into a modern LeetCode IDE with automated server-side submissions via Playwright and Scrapling; drove 120k+ impressions on its launch post.
• icpchue.com: Complete community learning platform featuring a library of recorded sessions, 650 curated problems, real-time leaderboard, and gamification badges (30k+ impressions).
• sast.tech: Autonomous AI security agent designed for the 'Vibe Coding' era—scanning web applications and auto-fixing vulnerabilities in real time.
• swrmz.tech: Want to sleep peacefully knowing your site is protected from DDoS? Automated Cloudflare Captcha orchestration that shields your endpoints while you sleep.
• hellishgolf.xyz: Daily Reddit browser mini-app golf game built with Vite and open-source 2D assets.
• zerothreat.xyz: AI-powered antivirus featuring a native Windows WPF client and browser extension.
• dcchub.xyz: Comic-inspired contest platform designed outside my comfort zone.
• spaceworth.site: ITI AI final project—real estate price regression model (90% accuracy) with interactive CAD drawing canvas and Gemini Vision parsing.
• Other shipped experiments: `acolite.xyz`, `hexless.xyz`, `sketchz.xyz`, and `yousefdev.xyz`.
All of these achievements are tied together in my portfolio at yust.dev, backed by over 650+ GitHub commits across the entire year.
A heartfelt thank you to all the professors and mentors who supported me through this journey: Dr. Hossam El-Din Moustafa, Dr. Basma Mostafa, Dr. Eman Raslan, Eng. Fatma Magdy, and Eng. Akram Zeyada.
Here's to an even bigger Level 3! 🚀