Hello World

I reckon, as all good computer scientists do, we start with an “Hello World”.¹ Anyways welcome to my blog!

Why am I even here?

Honestly as a graduate student, there are of better things to do with my time, but I guess I have things on my mind that I want to say and I enjoy reading others’ blogs as well. But I guess I should probably formalize what I want to do here a bit:

Technical Writing

I am someone who reads a lot about different Computer Science topics, and there’s also quite a bit that I want to write about. As someone who wants to teach Computer Science, particularly Computer Architecture, in the future. I feel that the best way to internalize what I’ve learned and to prepare for teaching is to see if I can explain what I’ve learned in a form that others can easily explain, I assume they call this the Feynman method or something? But anyways, I want to put discussions on topics that I’ve read about in general topics that I just find interesting.

Another thing that I want to do is to improve my paper reading and literature review. To so so, regularly, maybe once a month or so, I’ll go through arXiv² and find a paper I really like. From there, I’ll make a blog post in the form of a paper review. I’ll go through the methodology and results as a good part of the blog. The most interesting part; however, is talking about how these papers fit into the broader landscape and its strengths and weaknesses.

In addition to CS, as a physics major, I also want to learn more about physics and also pure maths too. My end goal is to probably have a grasp of physics and math at a basic graduate level. To do so, I’ll go through some different courses and try to see their curricula and follow them. Maybe once in a while, I will also make a post reflecting on my progress, since I will definitely not have as much motivation otherwise for my self-studying.

Writing About Hobbies, aka Puzzle Hunts

One of the hobbies I partake in a lot are puzzle hunts, which are quite an endeavor to make³ and I’d say deserve some reflection on. I’ve read many different puzzle hunt reflection blogs from those who are more experienced than I am, and I’ve really enjoyed reading them. I feel like writing about my own experiences will help be reflect and improve my skills too. In these posts, I’ll highlight puzzles that I particularly liked and also our general experiences during the hunt.

Other times, I’ll also want to create my own puzzles, so whenever I have ideas for a puzzle, I’ll probably put down a draft here alongside a write-up too as a spoiler for anyone who wants to know how to solve them.

Expectations

This blog is not going to be an insanely regular blog. I’ll mainly post things here when I have things to say, which is mainly

• During a school break
• After a big puzzle hunt (usually Mystery Hunt, we’ll see)
• After a paper submission
• Whenever I have things I want to say

However, I still want to set a semi-regular posting schedule for my own accountability. Thus, I’ll aim to have at least two sizable blog posts per academic term and one during summer.

As for the quality of these blog posts: these will not be quite polished and not what most might expect from a published paper. On the other hand, I’ll keep a more conversational style in my posts and these will be more informal. I hope to flesh this blog more soon!