Summer 2025 reflection

It is the summer!

Blogging

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

Future: 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 don'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 current next-mdx-remote setup, I'm really considering changing to @next/mdx for even more flexibility. It bugs me that I can't organize individual markdown pages into file groups for styling right now, since they're all statically generated in one folder.

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

Courses

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

Good	Passable	Terrible
CSCI 0190	CSCI 1450	COST 0120**
CSCI 1715	EGYT 1310	CSCI 1470
CSCI 0300	CSCI 1670	MATH 0540
CSCI 1680	ENGN 0520*	PHIL 1665
CSCI 1515		COST 0800**
		CSCI 2952R**
		MATH 1530
		EGYT 1320**

*If I didn't have to do labs, I think I could bump this up into the "good" category

**Practically speaking, I think you would have to be a proper graduate student to be a good TA. Perhaps "ability to TA" is not the best measurement...

It seems like my freshman fall and sophomore spring went alright, but I've mostly forgotten everything from my freshman spring and my sophomore fall. It also seems like this is 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 is, of course, n=4.)

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

Next semester, I'm thinking about shopping:

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

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

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

Employment

I have been gainfully employed this summer. Yes!

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

Future employment

I have found work in the CS Department to be meaningful. It has brought me a great deal of happiness and fulfillment. But I cannot escape the fact that... I am about to graduate. I need to find some other form of meaningful employment soon, or I really will go crazy out in the real world. So there's that.

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

Gym arc

I have been going to the gym, climbing, and playing DDR this summer.

It's 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 just finished the last of the V3s in the gym late August, and now I'm working through the V4s. If you're around Providence and want to go climbing at some point, hit me up.

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

Letting (as opposed to 'subletting')

It's really nice to have my own place! This apartment is around 2 minutes away from my workplace, so I can always return here for lunch. I find that doing daily household chores like cooking, doing laundry, and cleaning keeps me sane.

I have been leasing this apartment with my friends Aren and Jason. We've also had Alex W around over the summer. This is actually the group of people I spent last summer with (see summer 2024).

Puzzle club

bph-site is the open-source site we run Puzzlethon and BPH 2025 on. I've been actively developing it for MIT Mystery Hunt Prehunt 2026.

Footnotes

Tangentially, recruiting and LeetCode have been a major source of crisis for me for the past two semesters and summers. I usually face 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 ↩
I don't think that's 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. ↩