Hobbies

Originally, as a high school student, I wrote the University of Waterloo Math Competitions since I enjoyed solving problems (specifically, banging my head against them for the elusive feeling of a clever idea finally "clicking" into place). This led to my attempts at their computing offering, specifically the Canadian Computing Competition (CCC)

Even now, Leetcode and Codeforces are fun ways to spend the time while learning and building intuition for the kinds of problems I might end up solving at work. My activity waxes and wanes with the term, but I'm always down to try a fun problem you might have!

Since elementary school, running has been a fun skill to work through. It's useful for sports and getting to class on time alike! It wasn't until high school through our tradition of running 2.5k in the fall and spring that I really began to run long distance. In that time, I had the goal of being the fastest senior to finish the run. While I ultimately failed, the habit of occasionally running a quick 5k in my free time stuck, and here we are.

I'd say that I love running, but I'm not totally sure that it would be true. Perhaps a more fitting characterization would be that I love grinding through the pain and feeling the grim satisfaction of my performance tick up. Also, there's a little gremlin in my head that won't stop hopping around if I don't run. I've run up to a half marathon in a single go. I'm looking this summer (summer 2026 as of writing) to complete my marathon and to improve my 10k time!

In the time before time, I was interested in Dungeons and Dragons, but since my friend group wasn't nerdy enough to play it, I missed out. Still, it set the stage for interest as I made my way into Gloomhaven, and eventually, I came across an article about Dwarf Fortress. I started playing around that time, and have kept on going on-and-off since!

To be honest, I'm not totally sure why I love games like Dwarf Fortress and Nethack so much. Part of it is probably just the charm of a text-ish interface (a non-trivial luxury when the computer you're playing it on is 2 decades old!), and another is probably just the idea of almost living in a storybook and being given tips on how the world behaves but ultimately having the freedom to envision the world in your own way. Regardless, though I also enjoy RuneScape and Minecraft and Tetris and Pokemon as do most, I feel that there's just something special about old-ish roguelikes.

I started cooking half out of the ideological desire to remain somewhat independent, and for the ability to have a greater degree of choice when it comes to my nutrition. As a result, I started making some simple recipes every once in a while, maybe lunch one day, maybe an elaborate breakfast on another. And over time, especially as my knife skills and intuition for heating improved, I started to cook more, and to cook more elaborate dishes.

At the moment, I'm primarily cooking for myself since I'm studying away from home. I haven't been attempting more challenging dishes recently mainly due to time constraints and lack of ingredients. Nevertheless, I still find cooking an enjoyable part of my day. If nothing else, it's a comparatively relaxing interlude from the rat race of preparing for exams, rushing to finish assignments, and scrambling through pages of practice problems.

My initial introduction to breadboarding and electronics design came through an Electronics and Robotics class I took in high school. Only half the year was actually spent working on the electronics side, but I enjoyed it immensely. While most of the tasks were rather easy (given a schematic, lay it out on a breadboard and test it), I still found it fun to try my hand at rewriting schematics and to puzzle around finding the most efficient way to lay out circuits on a single half-sized breadboard (there was one assignment where I am still convinced that I could not have done better than 2 breadboards, though).

I'm still shaky with regards to circuit design, having never studied a formal or theoretical treatment of the topic, but through classes like AP Physics II, I've come to grips a bit more with the intution behind electronics. Although I had (and took) quite a few chances to play around with breadboarding in Physics and related competitions, as of late I haven't been able to do so as much due to the simple fact that I don't have the parts to work with. Regardless, I'm itching to buy a few microprocessors (specifically the Zilog Z80 or a 65c02!) and to try designing my own microcomputer.

If I'm going to be completely honest, I'm not sure where my interest in logic came from. More recently, I've been interested in the question of how effective "traditional" AI and machine learning strategies can be, and to explore that question, I feel that being reasonably familiar with mathematical logic and applicable mathematical fields is a hard prerequisite. As a result, I started reading into study materials from Logic Matters.

I've been learning a bit of related topics ever since I first found the study guide on the Logic Matters page. At the moment, my main focus is developing my intuition for Set Theory and extending my existing knowledge of First Order logic to bridge the gap to Second Order logic. At the moment, I still have a long way to go before I develop the skills I need for the projects I have in mind.