This is the first edition of the now page on this site. I’ve wanted to put one of these on here for a little while now, but it took a bit of peer pressure from seeing Noah work on his to spur me into finally making my own. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist about the writing I do (hence the slow blog release schedule), so I hope that this can be a more informal space to write without as high a stake. So, what’s going on?

#School

The 2025-26 academic year is coming to a close faster than I expected. As of the time of writing, my finals¹ are in a few days, and then… classes will be done and I’ll be a college senior. How this is possible when it feels like only yesterday that I graduated high school, I’m not quite sure.

One of the many existential horrors of being an upperclassman is witnessing your senior friends graduate a year before you. Not only will not having them at UW next year suck, but it’s an imminent warning that I’ll be crossing the same stage² in a year’s time. Eek!

In the meantime, at the very least, I’ve been enjoying the slightly-warmer Madison weather and hanging out as much as possible in the UPL with my friends.

Midway through May, I’ll have to get on a flight and head over to California though, because:

#Netflix Internship

I’m honestly not quite sure how I landed this but I’m insanely grateful. I’ve heard of Netflix’s engineering prowess from UPL members and alums for quite some time now and it boggles my mind that I’m going to have the privilege to take part in it myself.

It was just two years ago that, fresh off my freshman year, I was frantically asking Nico if it was even possible for me to get an internship, what with the proliferation of AI and my lack of projects/experience at the time. I think if you had told me that I would soon have two Bay Area tech internships under my belt I straight-up wouldn’t believe you. Most days I can’t even believe it myself.

#goatpenguin

Last December, in keeping with the tradition of building a project over winter break, I created goatpenguin, a weird mix between the Wikipedia category guessing game Catfishing and the Linkedin specificity puzzle Pinpoint. Making the actual site logic was simple enough (and I’ve applied various coats of paint to it since), but the real challenge has been creating a new puzzle for every day of the week for the last 90 days.

This isn’t a technical writeup (and I reserve the right to eventually make one on goatpenguin in the future, although I don’t know if there’s anything too interesting to write home about) but it’s worth noting that for the first 73 days, I was directly bundling the puzzles in the source code to produce the days. I would edit and push the changed +page.server.ts every night at 12:00AM and wait until it built to tell everyone to play. Eventually, I got sick of this (and wanted the ability to schedule more puzzles in advance), so I made an admin page that let me write to a tiny SQLite database. Being able to make changes to a puzzle and see it reflect in realtime is so satisfying compared to the build times before.

The reaction to it has been humbling to see. About 100 people play it every day, and it’s become a part of the culture of the UPL. “GP” is recognized UPL-speak. People have goatpenguin stickers on their laptops. At one point, a journalist from the CS department reached out to me to talk about it. It’s cool making a silly little project and seeing how far it can travel — I implore you to make your own! All in on the silly project economy.

#Engineering

I’m a computer scientist by trade, but I’ve always been interested in other kinds of engineering, too. Noah was working on completing a few educational keylogger PCBs for his cybersecurity club, and he invited me to the makerspace to help work on some. It was the first time I had through-hole soldered in a while (and my first time surface mount soldering) but it was still a great time, even if I accidentally destroyed a RP2040 by putting a 750° iron next to it trying to remove a massive ball of solder…

Helping Noah complete his PCBs rekindled a desire I had to design and complete my own, so I designed my own board, ordered some fabs from OSH Park, and purchased some through-hole components from DigiKey. That’ll be a story for another time (or blog post?) soon.

#Receipts

After begging him for months, Nico finally brought an old receipt printer he had left at home. Receipt printers are highly sought after by people like me who enjoy programming random things, because they effectively allow you to manifest any text or image into reality. They’re like a display, if the things you displayed were real. How magical is it that you can type a few lines of code and have whatever you want as a little slip that you can put wherever you want?

This has been a saga that will certainly receive its own blog post. But, for now, I can hint that I’ve procedurally generated and printed out mazes:

…made trading cards of all the CS professors that the people in the UPL and I could think of:

…printed out the entire first chapter of a book:

…and started work on a quasi-art piece that displays, in a grid, the UPL’s hours for any given day, using the data from the Zigbee sensor I put on the door.

I told you. It’s infinite fun. If you’re inspired, great! I’d advise you to get one. Just make sure, though, if you buy one, to use phenol free receipt paper, since there are reports of dangerous levels of chemicals absorbing into skin from the traditional sort.

#Closing

That’s all for now. Hopefully some of these updates are interesting — I’ll see if I can get a few more of these going over the next few months. Thank you for reading!

toot

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#Footnotes

1. For ASTRON 170, COMP SCI 540, COMP SCI 537, and MATH 331. ↩

2. This is, unfortunately, purely a metaphor, as UW’s too large a school to have the commencement ceremony include 10,000 students walking. ↩