CS404 - A Reflection

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January 19, 2026

"C-S-4-0-0 reporting for duty"

As the start of 2026 rolls around, marking the beginning of my time at WGU, I find myself reflecting on my previous cybersecurity "chapters" of life. By far, my favorite was the year I started CS404 at Cabrillo College.

While many of these memories are deeply personal to me and my friends, I've pushed myself to write about them about them because this website IS supposed to be a portfolio, after all. While I don’t believe that a blog post could ever truly show off everything CS404 managed to do and become, I can at least attempt to tell the story.

The Start of CS404

CS404 started as an idea in my head, that I could create a community space centered around cybersecurity and ethical hacking. I have to give credit to Elizabeth Shaw- my mentor and good friend, who sort of floated the idea of starting a club at Cabrillo. While not many members of the club actually know this, CS404 started back in my high school. It was much smaller back then, often just myself and two other people- a fact that I attribute to both the small school, and the difficulties that came with having a 30-45 minute lunch window (which was often shortened to 25 minutes thanks to long lunch lines and rule changes that no longer allowed students to eat indoors). The small and unknown nature of the club earned it its name (CyberSecurity 404- Not Found). Anyways, after minimal success with the club in high school, I came to Cabrillo ready to leave the idea in the past. But Elizabeth encouraged me to try again. That decision—to jump back in—led to countless memories, friendships, and a great deal of personal growth.

CS404 v2.00

To become a chartered club at Cabrillo, I needed a minimum of six people: four officers and two members (not including a faculty advisor). The first step was finding the three other leaders, a step that pushed me well out of my comfort zone. Coming from a small high school where almost no one shared my interest in cybersecurity, I was not super hopeful about finding like-minded people. I emailed my professors in my core classes with an announcement and waited. A few days later, I received an email from someone interested in joining the club. That small victory was what I needed to push me to continue my campaign- and I did have to push outside of my comfort zone. I consider myself an extrovert, so the problem wasn’t talking to new people, it was the fear of rejection that they wouldn’t want to join the club. I straight up asked a guy in my CIS-83 Enterprise Networking class after it had ended: “Hey, what’s up. Do you like cybersecurity?” And sparked a spiel about my proposed club. Jeremy responded by laughing, and reached into his backpack, took out a folder, and opened it to reveal he had already made a poster for an “IT club”- a similar venture. Needless to say, he jumped on board immediately.

As for our last officer (Lupe), I accosted him at the on-campus gym we both went to, and infamously lured him in by downplaying the commitment. I told him: “Yeah, I mean, it’s super low-key, just like an hour or two a week”, which I thought was true at the time. We still laugh about it to this day.

"Just one to two hours a week, Lupe..."

Our First Meeting

Fast forward to our first meeting, when I was nervous that no one would show up. Slowly, we had the first few people trickle in, just as timid as we were: “Is this the cybersecurity club meeting?” With each new person, I felt a small confirmation that the club was filling a real need. By the time we started the slideshow, about 20 people were in the room. I was shocked—and ecstatic. The amount of people that had turned out was a sign of validation (which I often used as a metric for success, a pitfall that I later realized– more people does not equal better club membership).

We ended up adopting the ‘slideshow method’ to teach our members, going over a wide range of topics, from Asymmetric Key Encryption, to Wifi Cracking, ARP poisoning, and SQL injections– and everything in between. We often followed the slideshow up by doing hands-on guided labs together. Over the next year, we also found that the larger purpose of our club was to create a community– a need that had been largely unfulfilled since COVID-19 largely killed group socializing. I remember talking to Marcelo (one of the best professors at Cabrillo, and our Club Advisor) about it at the time, and he said that a club like this had never existed at Cabrillo. They had an IT group that met, but it had died out seven or eight years before ours started– an eternity for a two year community college. We did a wide variety of events, from bi-weekly movie nights (of course we watched Hackers, and Wargames and other hacker-culture relevant movies), hosted cybersecurity ethics discussions, and even a faculty panel and beach bonfire (both of which were among our most memorable events). We even attended other local security conferences, and had the opportunity to collaborate with UCSC students at their campus at a “CNSA + CS404 BBQ”. There were many other events as well, but you get the idea. All of these were things I had dreamed of during high school, but never had the numbers or backing to make it happen. These events were a large part of why we had a lot of support from the faculty, and frankly, I got maybe TOO much leniency from my professors when it came to procrastinating classwork and turning in late work, which was another lesson I learned in organizing workload and forcing productive prioritization. While all of these events were a cornerstone of why the cybersecurity club garnered campus-wide attention, it came at a few costs, namely, a large time commitment that myself and the other officers and club members that stepped into leadership roles put into the slideshows, hands-on labs, event planning and coordination, marketing, and of course, the bureaucracy (which was most definitely the hardest part).

ICC Breaucracy

The ICC (or inter-club-council) was the governing entity of Cabrillo’s Clubs, who provided regulation and consistency for clubs in terms of administrative performance. However, learning their rules was an extensive, tedious, and at-times perplexing task. I won’t delve into too much of the politics here, but the ICC started every meeting with a motion to start the meeting, which required a second and no objections (or it would be put to a vote), and they expected clubs to have that same level of formality, (which frankly had no place in clubs like mine or ‘Sudoko club’, for example). While I know California’s Brown Act requires open meetings, which often encourages public bodies to adhere to Robert’s Rules of Order, the strict red tape made it so that even though our club earned funding, we never spent a cent of our club’s funds, relying on our own or external contributions to host events (Costco Pizza was a big help). The process to spend any amount of money (for example, renting a $2.99 movie for a movie night) required adding items to the public agendas by certain deadlines, member roll calls taken at weekly meetings, votes cast, minutes taken, forms filled, and– of course, ICC approval. The entire process would take quite some time, and even more to get reimbursed (I did only one event as a student, separate from the club, where I applied for funding and got approval, then paid for 10 gallons of Hot Cocoa and a some whipped cream cans for a studying event around finals time and it took over three months and a myriad of emails, including one to HR, to get reimbursed). I also know that dislike of the ICC’s strict policies came not only from my club, but from a lot of others (After I graduated Cabrillo, I heard there was a movement led by the philosophy club to reform it, which ultimately was put out).

CS404 Evolution

After the end of our first year, CS404 as a group decided to become an unofficial club, which allowed us more time to just hack together, instead of spending time on paperwork and mandatory ICC meetings. I still stand by the decision, because since then, CS404 merged into a group of friends casually hanging out, instead of a full fledged student union- which has given a lot of time back to the officers and members who were involved at the leadership level. Although I am glad CS404 found its place, I will admit that learning how to adhere to the bureaucratic rules as the leader of an organization was a large personal benefit, since paperwork is what makes the world go round, and I am certain that in my life I will eventually encounter another situation where I will have strict red tape to adhere to.

Ultimately, the story of CS404 is a long and traveled one, but at the end of the day we accomplished way more than I could have ever thought possible, and I certainly learned and practiced a lot of new skills- from public speaking, leadership, and communication, to time management and problem solving– this club was an incredible learning opportunity for me that I won’t ever forget.