I’ve always had the misguided tendency to outsource my agency—rely on my friends, family, and the internet instead of making decisions for myself. Once ChatGPT came out, I felt the need to bring it everything: personal problems, work decisions, even “what should I write in this birthday card.” We talk about this problem in education—the kids are cheating!—but it’s become increasingly easy to…
I just updated my personal website for the first time in a while, to reflect my dope new job at schoolhouse.world . While doing so, I decided to checkout random commits in the repository to see how the website has changed over time. This was surprisingly fun and nostalgic, so naturally, I wrote up a script to visualize the changes. First, I iterated through every commit in the repo, opened the…
In September 2019, my friend Varun and I went on a biking trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was an exhilarating and rewarding experience, and we’d do it again in a heartbeat. In this post, I’ll share more about the trip and the planning behind it, in the hope it inspires someone else! Mental and Physical Preparation How’d we get the idea? We weren’t seasoned bikers or anything–honestly,…
In my experience, when students learn data structures they (1) learn how they work theoretically (2) use off-the-shelf data structures to solve problems and (3) sometimes implement these data structures from scratch. However, I don’t often see classes exploring the off-the-shelf implementations, and the interesting practical considerations that come along with them. When I was a TA for 6.006 , I…
Last year, some friends and I got really into crossword puzzles and set out to construct a puzzle for the New York Times. I can’t get into details, but the puzzle idea required finding a crossword grid that satisfied a strict set of constraints. The search for this grid turned into an unnecessarily-complicated-but-really-fun coding project with some cool extensions. It’s been a year but I’ve been…
Testing, 1 2 3. Just making sure this theme works ! Looks good to me. And here's some code. Hello World was originally published by Akshay Ravikumar at Akshay's Blog on July 02, 2020.