For the last five years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019, 2020, and 2021 competitions on this blog. This year, I wrote three of the problems and helped Colin Siles with organizing the competition. For the first time since the 2019 competition, this year's HSPC featured in-person teams. There was also a remote option to increase the reach of the competition. Read more...

A couple weeks ago, my company had our week-long 2022 Q1 work retreat in Playa del Carmen, Mexico (about an hour south of Cancun). As with the previous work trip, the purpose of the retreat was for us to get to work together in person and to bond as a team. I got to see many of the people who were in Montreal again, and got to meet some of the new team members who have joined the company since September. Read more...

Every year since 2015, Eric Wastl creates a two-part programming problem for each of the 25 days of Advent. He publishes a new problem every day at adventofcode.com at exactly midnight EST which is 22:00 the day before for me in MST. Last year, I decided to do the problems as soon as they came out and streamed my problem solving sessions on my Twitch channel and uploaded them to my Youtube channel. Read more...

This morning, I woke up at around 04:30 in order to head to the airport. Ian is on the same flight to Denver as I am (he then continues on to Salt Lake City), and Caroline's flight leaves at about the same time as our flight, so we all got an Uber together. We got to the airport around 5:30, and going through security was really quick. In many places (including Montreal) you go through US Customs before departing. Read more...

As I mentioned in my previous post, the main reason for my travel was a work retreat with Beeper in Montreal. The purpose of the retreat was for all of us to get to work together in person. For most of us (myself included), it was the first time meeting anyone else on the team in person. In fact, the closest person to me in the company lives in Provo, Utah. Read more...

This morning, I met up with Sam, Jo, and Robby and we went to breakfast together at a café. Then, we headed over to the building museum which opened at 11:00. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian, but it was very well done. It is located in a vast building that used to be an administrative office for the Pension Bureau. In the covered "courtyard" of the building, they had an exhibit about the renovation of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Read more...

I woke up this morning around 08:30 with the plan to meet up with Sam, Jo, and Robby at the Air and Space Museum when it opened at 10:00. However, since Robby had gotten in so late, and had flown into Dulles (which is a long way away from DC), they were pretty slow getting up this morning. I decided to go over alone and start looking at the exhibits. Read more...

Next week, Beeper is having a company retreat in Montreal, Canada. Since I haven't really done any sort of leisure travel that requires air travel since the pandemic began, I decided to tack on a weekend getaway to the east coast. I decided to meet up with a few fellow Mines graduates to hang out in DC for the weekend. Today I flew out of Denver to Washington D.C., and I'll be flying to Montreal on Sunday. Read more...

Today I am happy to announce that I have joined Beeper, a startup that is building the future of chat by connecting all of your chat networks together in a single application. I will be primarily working on building bridges to other chat networks to bring more people into the Beeper ecosystem. Beeper is built on top of the Matrix protocol which is an open, decentralized communication protocol. I have been interested in Matrix since college (we used it for computer science club communications), and have been following its development closely for a few years. Read more...

For the last four years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019 and 2020 competitions on this blog. This year, I wrote one of the problems and helped with some of the administrative backend. I also hosted a live broadcast during the competition with another CS@Mines alum, Sam Sartor which you can view on YouTube. Read more...