foundation
the fall 2025 txcr demo day. a full showcase of what a student-led team can build when you give them real responsibility: new infrastructure, ai-powered support, a competition platform, and a full rebrand.
I opened with metrics because demo day is a day of celebration for what the team actually shipped. This wasn't a pitch or a concept deck. It was receipts.
The Triple S team (system, software, support) built more in one semester than most programs ship in a year. 273 students supported with class VMs, 3,000+ total since fall 2023. Tickets dropped 77%, from 325 down to 43, because we built documentation and automation that answered questions before people had to ask them. 100% of classes got on-site or live zoom support on day one. LinkedIn hit 100+ new followers with 17,000+ impressions and 48 comments on six posts.
On the product side: project Trinity gave us a student-built attack-defense competition platform (think CCDC meets ISTS, with blue teams fighting both a central red team and each other). Project Overwatch rebuilt our Discord bot from scratch so Jira syncs directly into our team communication. Project Manhattan overhauled the whole infrastructure, new SSO via Authelia, 17 OS templates, GitLab migration with CI/CD, OpenShift for containers, Vaultwarden for shared credentials, Cloudflare for domains and WAF. Project Rebirth redesigned the entire TxCR brand and website, new logo, new VM request form connected to a real Postgres backend, support ticket system, all of it. And project Synapse brought AI into support: a hybrid-search RAG chatbot on the public site plus an agentic ticket system that can read a ticket, pull documentation, reset MFAs directly in Authelia, draft a response, and send it on approval. What used to take 2 to 10 hours now takes 2 to 10 minutes.
The contributor program shipped its first cohort too. Two students came in with zero background in August and by December one had built an ML classifier for SOC alert triage (macro F1 of 0.75 on Microsoft's GUIDE dataset) and the other had done CTF writeups on SQL injection and directory traversal vulnerabilities. Both published posts on the Ranch Post.
Prof. Romero closed it out with a keynote I'll remember for a long time. He said he found the Texas Cyber Range as a pile of servers in a closet in 2018. "Most of this has happened in the last semester under Khoi's leadership." That hit.
I closed by thanking the team. You can manage well all you want, but if the people next to you don't want to be there, it's not a team. This one is a dream team.