Now, our weekly meetings will be on Fridays at 5:00 PM in PUP 206. You can attend online or in-person, and they're a great opportunity to unwind, make new friends, and share some laughs as we navigate through the semester together.

... we may have gone in a little hard on the meme positions. Anyways. Congratulations to all the new board members!

Many exciting things are in store for the upcoming year. We have obtained two new (well, used) servers and, thanks to the generosity of DoIT, have installed them in the campus data center. Together these comprise Greenbank's replacement, known as SADNET, and it's shaping up to be more robust, featureful, and powerful than Greenbank ever was. Improvements include a smoother auth system, the option of ESXi in addition to Proxmox, a large public IP range, and per-person private VM pools. We hope this system will prove useful for students' projects and learning experiences.

In addition, we have a new software project planned; but I'll let the new president tell you about that. Finally, we have a event coming up at some point, where UMBC students can make their own mini-home-servers using Chromeboxes we provide.

That concludes the useful info. The rest of this post is just a story that I figured I should write down eventually.

When I was first introduced to this club, it was at Involvement Fest, in the fall of 2019. The club was pretty much a Cyberdawgs spinoff, the whole board being Cyberdawgs members. The table was mostly bare; the founder, Drew, had a cardboard sign labelled "SAD club looking for SAD members" (see thumbnail), along with some cool QR code art (that linked to a dQw URL, of course). I joined, of course; it sounded awesome, and how could you say no to that face?

The following school year brought, well, maybe three or four meetings. I only went to one or two of them myself. When I was there, there were maybe four or so attendees. It was the pre-COVID world; there were in-person CTFs and hackathons and parties (just kidding, this is UMBC). Seemed nobody had time for a nerdy club with a funny name. Eventually, around spring of 2020, Drew prepared to graduate, and held an election meeting. I wanted to attend - so I could run for something funny like Environmental Advisor - but couldn't, due to a class. So imagine my surprise when he came to me later and said "oh yeah, Nikola, we made you president." Of the club I'd been to about two meetings of.

And, so, what now? I asked Henry to be the VP, and he enthusiastically agreed. I asked Bradley to be the treasurer. The rest of the board was populated by random Cyberdawgs graduates (yeah, pandemic and all, SGA did not actually check if they're active students). Around this time, COVID hit, and the club with the funny name was pretty low on everyone's list. It was mentally shelved away until fall of 2020.

That fall arrived - sadly, still online. We showed up at Virtual Involvement Fest. We meme'd up the myUMBC page. We made a Zulip (something something, self-hosting); a whopping 13 or so people joined. And we held a meeting - on Jitsi, as always - and lo and behold, people came! Cameras off, muted, talking via the textchat in true CS fashion - but people came! And they were actually interested!

In retrospect, the lockdown may have been a blessing in disguise. This is a computer club; we are computer folks. Nobody had time for it, at least in its baby state, in the in-person world. But in the remote world, while many clubs had to go dormant, SAD functioned just fine. And so interest grew. And the meetings gradually became more cohesive and contentful. And personally, I really started looking forward to those Friday nights, a spark of life in the dreary COVID world of 2020.

When spring of 2021 rolled around, we launched Greenbank - from a server in my basement. The rest of the club finally knocked some sense into me and we switched from Zulip to Discord. We had our first meeting run by a non-board-member: Leyton's AI talk, which was followed by Daniel's Swift talk. And at some point, per Emma's suggestion, Bradley got us a brick. The SAD brick. It says "SAD" on it.

In fall of 2021, at long last, we were finally back in person. The ILSB became home base; post-meeting dinners at dhall ($6 Fridays!) became a tradition. There was a lot of turnover, as always happens over summer. Some "online SAD" regulars stuck around, but most went on to other things. I, personally, will always be grateful to those who showed up on Jitsi back when the entire pitch of this club was "we have a funny name".

In late 2021, we were invited to give a talk at HackUMBC. I think that's the first time we realized this thing wasn't just a meme club anymore.

Going from 2021 into 2022, Bradley finally figured out the arcane language of the Finance Board, and won us $1000 for a new club server. DoIT, to my surprise, actually agreed to let us put it in the data center (no need for the original plan of hiding it under the floor tiles), and overall their generosity surpassed our wildest expectations. Griffin, Josh, Rob, and Matthew all held meetings, and they were phenomenal. The club was no longer just Henry and I sharing our screens on Jitsi setting up Ubuntu VMs. It was the real deal.

And, well, that's it. That's where we are now. The club that started with a cardboard sign at Involvement Fest, a half-fake board, a constitution about Calvinism, and a few guys on Jitsi talking about Minecraft and Linux... now has servers in the data center, multiple active projects, HackUMBC presentations, a 150+ member Discord, a 10-person board, consistent active meetings, and a brick.

To say that I am blown away would be an understatement. Since 2020, I have been continually shocked to find that people are actually interested in the club with the funny name, and to see the amount of support we've received. This club has unquestionably been the centerpiece of my latter two years at UMBC, and yes, ironically, SAD has made me quite happy. Through this club I've had fun, made new friends, and learned so much.

And so I'd like to thank Henry Budris, without whom this club probably would have died, for sticking with us since the early days. I'd like to sincerely thank Drew Barret for founding this thing in the first place, silly name, rickrolls, and all. I'd like to thank Bradley Stamler, Emma Hunter, Matthew Quast, Leyton Lineburg, Daniel Williams, and the other board people and COVID-era members. I'd like to thank Geoff Weiss, our faculty advisor. I'd like to thank Toren Smith for his presence, knowledge, and support, and the other DoIT staff (Damian, Roy, and others) for their help and generosity.

And I'd like to thank everyone who contributed, or simply just kept on showing up, to the club with the funny name and the brick. I wish I could list out all your names, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.

So long, and best of luck to the new board. I'm immensely excited to see where this thing will go.

Have fun!