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.

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. It’s kinda a strange system, but it’s nice because you can walk out of the plane at your destination in the states and don’t have to worry about customs. When we got to customs, it wasn’t even opened yet. I guess we could have had another few minutes of sleep!

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.

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.

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. On my way, I came across a 9/11 display on the mall. There were flags representing all the people who lost their lives on that terrible day.

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 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. One of the biggest factors that has caused me to be interested in the protocol is that it is decentralized by design via federation. That means that anyone can run a Matrix homeserver and federate (communicate) with all of the other Matrix homeservers in the federation. This is very similar to how email servers can communicate with one another (you can email people on Gmail from an Outlook.com email, for example), and you can even run your own email server!

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. In the broadcast, we provided commentary on the competition, hosted interviews with problem authors, and talked to former HSPC and ICPC contestants.

For the last three years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about last year’s competition in this post. This year, although I am no longer a student at Mines, I wrote two of the problems, and I volunteered during the competition.

Due to the current COVID-19 lockdown, the competition was held remotely, which meant that we were unable to enforce a no-internet rule as we are able to during on-site competitions. Luckily, the problems are all unique, and written by Mines students and Mines alum specifically for the competition which makes it very difficult to search the internet for answers.