Building a Better RCQ Locator
I built a website for finding Regional Championship Qualifiers for Magic: The Gathering that you can check out at https://surveil.land.
Kevin Yap
Latest posts
Blue Skies Ahead
I joined Twitter in December of 2008, making me 12 years old at the time. Funnily enough, the fact that I signed up before turning 13 caused issues nearly a decade later, when my account got locked due to some automated process …
Building a Hackintosh
2020 was an exciting year for Mac users because Apple finally released computers powered by their own custom silicon. Despite this, for some reason, it was the year that I finally caved and decided to build a Hackintosh. For about 7 years …
Architecting zeal.gg
Back while I was interning at Riot Games, I spent one weekend throwing together a prototype for what would eventually become zeal.gg . The purpose of it was to graph the solo queue ranking of our intern cohort while we were working …
The Year of Communication
The idea of a new year being a time to reflect and set goals always felt reasonable to me, though I had never set any personally. I think I had always (correctly) predicted the difficulty of sticking with a single resolution for …
Going Fast in Advent of Code
I have been a big fan of Advent of Code since it started back in 2015, and have spent every December since diligently solving as many problems as I can right at 9pm. Rather than a chocolate hiding behind each day like …
Eval Golf (PlaidCTF Writeup)
Sticking with the theme of CTF writeups, here s one of a fairly simple challenge from PlaidCTF 2019 . Given that Python is my programming language of choice, it was fun to work on a Python-based challenge (rather than the low-level exploits that …
Rickety Roulette (picoCTF Writeup)
Recently, I ve taken an interest in CTFs : computer security competitions with tasks that have been specifically designed to have a specific weakness. The goal is to exploit these weaknesses through various methods such as reverse engineering, binary exploitation, or cryptanalysis in …
Breaking the Enigma Code With Rust
If I had to pick something from the humanities to study in university, I would probably go with history. Not only is history interesting in and of itself, but having a good grasp on history clarifies a lot of modern geopolitics. War …
The Joy of Problem Solving
This past semester, I took one of my favourite computer science courses to date Intermediate Algorithm Design and Analysis . The course helped me realize my passion for reasoning about interesting problems, and being able to convey ideas about these problems to others …
Reflections and Resolutions
It s already the last day of 2015, and I ve only published a single post this year (and on the first of January, no less). It turns out I m not actually limited to posting technical articles here, so I figured …
On Git and GitHub Flow
Recently, I have been making an added effort to seek out and contribute to open source projects on GitHub. The motivation behind this was largely the 24 Pull Requests project, which encourages developers to submit one pull request for each day in …
EulerPy — Streamlining Project Euler
As someone relatively new to the world of programming, I m always looking for resources that will help me become more experienced. I had read the name Project Euler countless times, but had attempted to work through the problems before, and ultimately …
Deploying Pelican Sites Using Travis CI
After learning about Travis CI through browsing open-source projects on GitHub, I became interested in seeing if it was possible to incorporate it into my already existing workflow based on GitHub Pages . Even though Pelican is a static site generator, adding Travis …
On Programming and Turtles
Minecraft is one of my favourite games. At the time of writing, over 13 million copies have been sold for the PC alone an impressive statistic considering the game was in alpha merely three years ago. Minecraft s popularity is due primarily …
Styling Code Blocks Using Pelican
Although Monokai is my colour scheme of choice when coding in Sublime Text 2 , it was not the best option for displaying code blocks on my website. Favouring a lighter colour scheme, I opted to use a GitHub style colour scheme and …
Hosting With GitHub Pages
Over the past couple of days, I made the switch to using GitHub as the hosting platform for my website by using GitHub Pages . This felt like a natural progression as I already used GitHub for version control for the source of …
The Great (White) Pelican Migration
When browsing /r/programming a while back, I came across a link to a blog post written by Greg Reda . While reading the post, I noticed the platform that his website was generated with Pelican and at the time, I was in …
The Power of AppleScript
One of my favourite genres of music is video game music. Because of this, it was no surprise that I was ecstatic when OverClocked ReMix announced that ReMixes 1-2500 were available to download via torrent, and that every file contained complete and …
Hello, Blogosphere!
After much consideration, I ve finally decided to start a blog. One reason is to expand my writing skills (I don t write nearly enough), but the main reason I ve decided to do so is because I now have my own …