My story

  \ So I have a streak of posting every month and I can't finish 2026 Q2 EDM so I will be writing about my cubing competition from last month lmao.  I went to my first competition in almost a year and it was super fun. I'm now full-time j*b in Seattle and I woke up at like 5 am on a Saturday and drove 3 hrs to a city called Ellensburg which is this small town in Washington. The college CWU Central Washington University is here and other than that its just sum small town super calm.  So I signed up for 3 events: 3x3, 3x3 OH, and skewb. We started off with skewb in the 1st round in which I did HORRIBLE like I'm washed at skewb and I did do some training prior to get myself in shape but I'm still shaking off the rust and I was barely warmed up. But it's first round so nothign rly matters, final round is when it matters. This is my first time competing in Skewb in like 3 years which is fun and I did get worse but i dont think that much worse like I still remember all of...

 My last cubing competition was Oct 14 2023, So 2 years later, this past weekend i went on a little trip to 2 cubing competitions in 2 days. Both of these competitions had the 3x3 blindfolded event. I signed up for these comps in late September, not having any real successes under my belt and not knowing any of the 3x3 BLD algs. I knew some theory because I briefly tried learning it before giving up. So I basically gave myself a month to drill down 3x3 blindfolded. It's literally such a quintessential storybook of just setting myself an ambitious goal and then pushing myself to work for it. Friday - Berkeley At around noon I drive over to Berkeley before picking up my friend Ashwin who took the Amtrack from Davis to Berkeley. Then we met up with Allen at this LanZhou noodle place by his apartment which was pretty good. I like the city LanZhou cuz its kinda close to inner mongolia and its an interesting city ive seen a couple of videos its kinda like a desert city but also super urb...

 So I can't believe I'm writing these words BUT I AM GOING TO WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS 2025!! There's so much to talk about, I've been cubing since like 6th grade and I went to my first competition in 2015 and so I've been following pretty much every world championship along with national championship and watching YouTubers vlogs there and just being so jealous at how insane the words venues are and how many events go on and how just the entire community gets together. Childhood me would be so happy and proud knowing that I made it, its literally a childhood dream come true.  Now I'm not competing because I only knew I'd be in Seattle this summer in February, and the registration opened way before that and the 2,000 competitor limit hits like the same day it opens. So I settled with the spectator badge and its legit perfectly fine. It's honestly crazy how its in Seattle the exact year that I'm interning here like I remember when I realized randomly one da...

  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...

 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...