01The club
DaVinciCode is ESILV's cybersecurity student club (Pôle Léonard de Vinci). It runs workshops, training sessions and the DaVinciCTF (DVCTF), a student competition whose 2026 edition was the 5th.
I've been a member since October 2024: workshops, team CTFs, and a lot of learning from more advanced students.
02My role in the Infrastructure project
Since October 2025 I've been part of the Infrastructure project, which manages the servers hosting the club's internal services and competition platforms.
- Operations: keeping services available and reliable.
- Improvements: making the existing infrastructure better rather than piling things on.
- Hardening: strengthening the security of the services members rely on.
- Event support: deploying and managing the environments needed for training and competitions.
Since August 2026 I've been contributing remotely from Riga. It's good practice in discipline (documentation, clean remote access, asynchronous communication).
03What it teaches me
CTFs taught me to attack; infrastructure teaches me to defend and keep things running. Hosting a CTF platform means, by definition, hosting a service hundreds of people will try to break.
- Linux system and network administration;
- monitoring and automating recurring tasks;
- teamwork on shared infrastructure (who does what, who has access to what);
- the blue-team point of view, essential to doing useful offensive work.