My story

  So this weekend hosted by UCSC's CruzHacks, my team attended CruzHacks 2025. It was a really fun experience where going into it I didn't know what to expect. This really isn't my niche, as when it comes to coding I'm mainly an expert on the algorithms & data structures aka competitive programming. It involves solving algorithmic problems, writing solutions, optimizing them for the time constraints and test cases, and a lot of practice and studying and preparation. And so it's quite different and quite sweaty, and it was really cool to experience these hackathons which is this different side of programming. ICPC stuff and the performance is also way more measurable than hackathons, where theres a lot more creativity and flexibility involved. Surprisingly this is my first ever hackathon, despite almost like every cs kid doing one in high school and stuff.   Our team was me, my housemate named evan, and a friend named austin. We didnt have a 4th. The venue was th...

     Recruiting Reflection (cut-out version) My freshmen year summer was one of a kind. I spent time in 4 continents: USA (5 weeks), Spain (3 weeks), Morocco (1 week), China (3 weeks), I even went to Florida in May. My sister also went studying abroad her freshmen year summer and suggested I do the same because I'm going to be working for the rest of my life, and it's hard enough to get an internship with as little experience I have.  So as I wrapped up my freshmen year summer and I was heading into mid-September and October, the pressure started looming above me. I need to get an internship this summer because apart from the growth I get from it obviously, I know my worth, I know what I deserve, and it's so crucial for me because I'm planning on graduating in 3 years.  This post is what I brand as the "cut-out version" because my sister told me theres some details I shouldn't post on the public blog. So I ended up deleting a lot of bullet points and delet...

 So the ICPC regionals this year was November 16 instead of February like last year and it's cuz they are adjusting back to the schedule pre-covid. I knew it would come this early tho so I did spend some stretches in the summer while traveling grinding some segment tree problems but ultimately as the school year came I put all my free time towards recruiting and geoguessr lmao. Before Contest Either way, safe to say I wasn't proud of the amount of preparation I put in because I'm like the leader of the team now with the other 2 graduating from last year. We organized weekly practice sessions on Wednesday and sometimes on Saturday too, we would just virtual a contest as a team and get to feel out our team dynamics and splits. The week of the contest, I printed out the entire problem set on paper of the 2022 pacnw contest and we also simulated it more realistically with only one laptop and we put the livestrema on my laptop we could view a "live" scoreboard. Anyway...

 Hello from Orlando, Florida! I am currently lying in my bed at the end of day 2 and I'm not going to lie I don't really feel like writing a super thorough blog post, because there's just way too much that happened. And it's gonna make me anxious to write down everything and make sure I don't miss something. I'll just write some very broad stuff. There is so much to talk about, so much to write about though.  Day 1 photoalbum  - Woke up at like 3:30 AM (got 2 hours of sleep cuz i went to bed at 12 AM and couldn't even fall asleep)  - Daniel, one of my teammates, picked Hazel and I to go to the airport, SJC.   - Got our boarding passes went thru security and went on first flight to Dallas  - 1 hr layover that went to Orlando.  - After tons of traveling we made it, and we uber'd. That uber ride was really crazy, cuz its like a 20 minute uber to the hotel and I got to see a lot of Florida. Just wow, those forests of like tropical eucalyptis trees, an...

 So there is a game on AoPS called All-Ten  where you're given 4 single-digit numbers and are asked to make all numbers 1-10 using just those 4 numbers and operations. You must use all four (you can't just use 3) and u can also combine digits, u can just play the game on the site if u dont get what i mean. Anyway so the other day I was sooo stuck. You are given numbers 4, 5, 8, 8. And you want to make the number 6 out of them. Think about it. It's not that bad in hindsight. I tried everything in my head and I was staring at my screen for like 30 minutes just figuring out this last number out. I've never been stuck like this before where I can't get it even after 30 minutes. And so with that frustration in my mind I was stubborn to find it so I was like "imma just write a quick program to figure this last one out" cuz I really wanted to complete the board. So here we go writing a program that brute forces all combinations, it's very similar to  https://...

How do I even start. So I'm in the competitive programming club here at UC Santa Cruz where the premise is basically just centered around ICPC. It's a big competition that's truly global. Like tons of European and Asian colleges along with middleeastern and even African colleges participate in it. It's basically groups of 3 people solving a set of ~13 problems from colleges. And not to mention the contest is literally 5 hours long. stream link general/broad contest page So before I get to the contest man I woke up at 7:30 and got to the quarry plaza at 8 AM where one of the coaches/UCSC student picked me up and the rest of my team to carpool to De Anza college. Here we are at the California venue. Notably Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, SCU, De Anza themselves, SFU, SJSU, Chico state, and some other CSUs and other colleges. So you know what that means TIMOTHY PULLED UP which was so fun because first of all when we got there I saw this guy: THAT right there is xiaowuc1. Wh...

 So around August of 2022, Heroku(the company i use to deploy my site) was bought off by salesforce and decided to start charging money for running sites, with basically no free option.  I didn't realize this until like last month, and I finally stopped procrastinating yesterday and switched the site to a new webhost, PYTHONANYWHERE!!! Funfact,  flaggle  uses pythonanywhere to host. So after a couple hours I finally got it to be compatible and launched. I will update the blog page about this too, but yeah, cool that it's finally up and running again. Lyric(s) of the Post:  " Someday both of us are leaving here but for now, I'll just bring the sea to you " Everything Goes On - Porter Robinson

  I've made the site:  https://randomblogpost.herokuapp.com/ I've also added it to a page because that's how useful I think it is. This was pretty fun to work on, I learned lots of new things and for once I was actually interested in it so like I was naturally motivated to learn which was cool. Let's see what I make next! Lyric(s) of the Post:  Another classic day of being a pirate What shall I do? Have my pirate breakfast, bottle of rum Clean my pirate teeth, do my pirate taxes No wait, I'm a pirate, I don't do taxes But most importantly, I'll be having some seshin' Want to know why? Teminite & Jonah Hitchens - Sesh The Seven Seas

So this Sunday I went to the library and it took me like 2 hours around to finish it. I definitely learned a lot about APIs and just basic like programming lm*o. But yea, I created a program that utilizes the blogger API to generate an array of URLs for every blog post. I cannot leak that program because the source code contains my blogID and userID. Confidential information.  However, I can convert the array itself into a txt file and just do it that way. It won't update everytime but on the other hand the array doesn't need to be filled everytime you run something.  So yea repl isn't going to be final product ofc. During winter break I'm going to try to get it into a website so that you can't see the source code. Hopefully my sister helps me with that. I'm pretty excited, I've had this idea in my mind quite literally since I started this blog. Returns a random URL from amy 437 current blog posts: https://replit.com/@wilsonxie/random-blog-post?v=1 Lyric(s) ...

 Every week there's a leetcode contest with 10,000 participants. It consists of interview-style questions and I do them when I can. Today, everything went right for me.  https://leetcode.com/contest/weekly-contest-267/ranking/2/ RANK 46. Completed the contest in 31 minutes with 0 bugs.  QUESTION 1: Oddly confusing problem statement for a question 1 but the constraints are always super loose so any sort of brute force will work and that's what I did. I should've done Q1 in Python like I always do but I forgot. That may have cost me some time. QUESTION 2: As soon as I see LinkedList I immediately know to code-golf this one. I immediately converted it to a list and manipulated it easily like that and converted it back. This is a contest where ranking > learning. Sorry! QUESTION 3: A pretty straightforward implementation String question. I was lucky to not make any stupid bugs and got AC first try.  QUESTION 4: After reading it, I immediately knew this was an easy Uni...

Here's how it went down: CF div 3 I chilled out with A-D as they were all straightforward implementation problems. Then on E I had to do a bit of thinking and couldn't come up with anything, so I moved to G cuz I saw that a lot of people solved it but it was clear that it was a full-on math concept(and it was). SOOO i looked at F and solved it and that was basically the contest. I was gonna get like a +60 rating but then I FAILED SYSTEM TESTS FOR D aeraewrewarAEWREWARBRUH  OK whatever so i moved on to bsio  q1 was pretty common q2 i knew was line sweep but I was so confused on how it was a   q2 but whatever I went with it q3 took me a second to understand but once I understood the problem it wsa pretty chill. I've done similar things like this like "walled off" which is a bit different cuz it has some DSU components but hte concept of blocking with the queries is pretty useful q4 i was dead and like I maybe coulda tried dijkstra during the contest but I was just n...