I grew up in a computer lab cracking software and pirating books [1] onto my Kindle [2]. This summer, I've photographed Tibetan manuscripts (120GB!) in the Himalayas, and trained a RL model to fulfill my childhood dream of reaching #1 on gen7ou. *There's lots more, but these are the coolest to me. So how did I get here?
TLDR: In 2022, my steel supplier left our burgeoning fire staff monopoly for web3. I write more about this as a preface to some adventures there here, but this all coalesced into my internship at Helius. My sophomore year was thus spent catching stand-ups at midnight, pushing commits right before exams, and teaching developers over twice my age how to use our RPCs.
Junior year, alongside my IB diploma, I joined RevisionDojo. I worked alongside two-ish other engineers as we scaled from 3,000 to nearly 200,000 students. We also got into YC's F24 batch! This all coincided with the advent of GPT-4, and I'm pretty confident that we worked on some of the first AI-generated lessons ever. Merging the PR while I was sick and seeing twenty thousand lessons created just hours after release (during summer no less) is still a core memory of mine.
Almost all of these were only possible because someone on the other side had responded to my cold email/message. So if I can help you, consider reaching out!
[1] Apologies to Adobe, and shoutout to Calibre.
[2] For reference, one of my favorite web novels, ISSTH, has a word count of 3.3 million!