Summer 2025

What a summer!

Contents:

1. Blogging
2. Courses
3. Employment
4. Future employment
5. Gym arc
6. Letting (as opposed to 'subletting')
7. Puzzle club
8. Archive

Blogging

To be honest, while I love writing, I always ended up spending more time adding new features. So here was a changelog, just to keep myself honest:

Planned: Table of contents, switch to @next/mdx

5/29/25: I added a 'Notes' section to the index page and started this changelog.

5/28/25: I wanted to put my Markdown notes on DDIA and Outlive up on the site, but I didn't like how it looked with the regular styling. I made a more colorful, compact, multi-column design for these specific pages. While this was not too hard to do with my next-mdx-remote setup, I was really considering changing to @next/mdx for even more flexibility. It bugged me that I couldn't organize individual markdown pages into file groups for styling, since they were all statically generated in one folder.

5/26/25: I had a few pages like Courses @ Brown and Now that I kept revising, and it was hard to tell when there was a new version of them. So I added 'Recent' posts to the index page and changed the metadata to keep track of the update date too.

Courses

I had been reflecting on how much information I was actually retaining from my coursework. Here's a thought experiment: If I had to TA a course, how well would I do?

It seemed like my freshman fall and sophomore spring went alright, but I had mostly forgotten everything from my freshman spring and my sophomore fall. It also seemed like this was related to the number of courses I took. In semesters that I took 4-4.5 instead of 5 courses, I retained more from all of them. (The sample size was, of course, n=4.)

But in general, the results... were better than I expected. I only wished I remembered more about CSCI 1680, CSCI 1515, and CSCI 1450.

For the next semester, I was thinking about shopping:

1. Mechanics of Solids and Structures (ENGN 0310)
2. Diversity of Life (BIOL 0210)
3. Introduction to Oceanography (EEPS 0070)
4. Data Structures, Algorithms, and Intractability (CSCI 0500)
5. Software Security and Exploitation (CSCI 1650)
6. Sustainable Design in the Built Environment (ENVS 1400)
7. Theory of Computation (CSCI 1010)
8. Graphics (CSCI 1230)
9. Designing High-Performance Network Systems (CSCI 1675)
10. Topics in Programming Languages (CSCI 1951Q)
11. Digital Electronics Systems Design (ENGN 1630)
12. Special Topics in Computational Design and Fabrication (CSCI 2952Y)
13. The Political Economy of Hard Policy Problems (IAPA 0700)

My suspicion was that my schedule was going to look like this:

1. Digital Electronics Systems Design (ENGN 1630)
2. Software Security and Exploitation (CSCI 1650)
3. Topics in Programming Languages (CSCI 1951Q)
4. Sustainable Design in the Built Environment (ENVS 1400)
5. Diversity of Life (BIOL 0210)

Employment

I was gainfully employed that summer. Yes!

I was working as a SPOC (Systems Programmer, Operator, and Consultant) for my dear department's TStaff. My project was on creating a common course container that could support the needs of all the CS courses in the department.

Future employment

I had found work in the CS Department to be meaningful. It had brought me a great deal of happiness and fulfillment. But I couldn't escape the fact that... I was about to graduate. I needed to find some other form of meaningful employment soon, or I really would go crazy out in the real world. So there was that.

I spent that summer brushing up algorithms and data structures. Unfortunately, while I loved learning things like topological sort and union-find, I just couldn't bring myself to do LeetCode consistently. Maybe I'd be more locked-in in the fall.¹

Gym arc

I had been going to the gym, climbing, and playing DDR that summer.

It was kind of surprising how much progress you can make in a hobby when you spend a few hours on it each week. I didn't climb at all last semester, so I started the summer off on V2s and V3s. I finished the last of the V3s in the gym in late August, and I was working through the V4s.

I didn't have the numbers for DDR, but I recently broke through Expert 14. I had been pretty stuck on Hard 8 and Hard 9 at the beginning of the summer, but the grading scheme in DDR was pretty song-pack-dependent.

Letting (as opposed to 'subletting')

It was really nice to have my own place! The apartment was around 2 minutes away from my workplace, so I could always return for lunch. I found that doing daily household chores like cooking, doing laundry, and cleaning kept me sane.

I had been leasing that apartment with my friends Aren and Jason. We also had Alex W around over the summer. This was actually the group of people I had spent the previous summer with (see summer 2024).

Puzzle club

bph-site was the open-source site we ran Puzzlethon and BPH 2025 on. I had been actively developing it for MIT Mystery Hunt Prehunt 2026.

1. Tangentially, recruiting and LeetCode had been a major source of crisis for me for the past two semesters and summers. I usually faced my problems by obsessively studying and reflecting on them (see: AP exams and college admissions). But with recruiting, I was constantly indecisive and avoidant. Did I want to do an internship? My friends didn't enjoy theirs. Surely I had better things to do than to send off hundreds of applications.[^2]

2. I didn't think that was the right mindset anymore. You can try to convince yourself that you don't want something, or that the cost of getting something is greater than the benefit of having that thing. But if you keep thinking and worrying about that thing, you should just commit to getting it. Or trying your best to get it. The worst thing you can do is waffle around and make yourself miserable.