Nil Pointers

Academia 2.0
Building Big O Speedrun in two days: how agents ingest, verify, and broadcast new research results, and my agentic workflow.
October 12, 2026ResearchAI
Isomux for Enterprise 2: Turning your company AI native
A playbook for turning your company AI native with Isomux, one automated business process at a time.
October 5, 2026IsomuxAI
The Knight's Tour With Fewest Crossings: Agents Narrow the Gap
AI agents narrowed a gap from our 2019 paper: every closed knight's tour needs at least 5n - 597 crossings (tentatively), and some have at most 19n/3 + 142.
October 4, 2026ResearchAI
The Knight's Tour With Fewest Turns: Solved by Agents
AI agents closed the gap on a problem from our 2019 paper: every closed knight's tour needs at least 8n - 28 turns, and some have only 8n - 14.
October 3, 2026ResearchAI
Browser Use for Cloud Agents: An Implementation Guide
What we tried for Browser Use with cloud agents, what broke, and the design we kept.
October 3, 2026IsomuxAI
Isomux for Enterprise: Agents for Normies
Getting normies to use agents at work with multiplayer agent systems.
September 30, 2026IsomuxAI
The Personal Software Suite
A case for personal-software suites as a meta-harness feature: the agents build the apps, and the meta-harness runs them.
August 28, 2026IsomuxAI
Building a Hosted Agents Product End-to-End
Building a hosted agents product: the design, the architecture, starting a company, and my agentic workflow.
August 21, 2026IsomuxAI
Making Agents User-Friendly
A list of ideas for interacting with agents.
August 8, 2026IsomuxAI
A Fully Annotated NanoGPT Script
All 355 lines of a competitive GPT training script, explained line by line for readers who have never built a transformer.
July 11, 2026AI
How to Build a Self-Improving Agent
From a hand-coded agent to a system that co-evolves its own code, tasks, and weights.
July 7, 2026AI
Context Composer: Editing Your Agent's Context Behind Its Back
A proxy that turns a Claude Code session's context into editable frames - delete, compact, offload, and reorder what the model sees.
June 18, 2026AI
The cold email that got me into a PhD
My PhD origin story.
June 7, 2026ResearchDS&A
The RL Environment Gold Rush
How frontier models are trained, what RL environments are, and what the job actually looks like at the companies creating them.
May 7, 2026AI
Isomux: Designing a Meta-Harness
Design, architecture, and takeaways from building a meta-harness that supports multi-user, multi-device, and multi-agent conversations.
April 3, 2026IsomuxAI
Deep Dive: Inference Pipeline for Self-Play
A detailed walkthrough of the inference pipeline powering self-play for the AlphaZero-style AI behind the Wall Game.
March 24, 2026Wall GameAI
The Dormant Lighthouse
A fictional story set in a world where the sea flows one way.
February 27, 2026
Training an AlphaZero-Style AI for a New Board Game
A playbook for building AlphaZero-style AIs, from architecture to training to deployment.
February 16, 2026Wall GameAI
Toolkit-X: A better way to do DS&A problem lists
Introducing Toolkit-X: a free DS&A toolkit with curated BCtCI problems that can be used like a traditional problem list.
December 11, 2025BCtCIDS&A
Herding 1440 Programs: Automating Large-Scale Codebase Changes for BCtCI
How do you coordinate 'trivial' changes across 1440 programs in 5 languages? Lessons from running the BCtCI codebase.
December 10, 2025BCtCIAI
In Defense of Coding Interviews
An argument in favor of DS&A interviews.
October 27, 2025DS&A
2-List Stable Matching: The Easiest Problem I Couldn't Solve in My PhD
My open challenge for 'research-level' reasoning LLMs: a deceptively simple special case of stable matching.
September 29, 2025Research
BCtCI Chapter: Set & Map Implementations
Learn how sets & maps are built from scratch, and refine your knowledge of hashing.
September 28, 2025BCtCIDS&A
BCtCI Chapter: Monotonic Stacks & Queues
Learn how monotonic stacks and queues are two sides of the same idea and how to leverage them in interviews!
September 27, 2025BCtCIDS&A
Counting Islands in a Grid: DFS or BFS?
A deeper look at this classic grid problem - including some beautiful fractals that unexpectedly appear in the BFS analysis.
September 26, 2025DS&A
Building Lego castles with recurrences, memoization, and math
A walk through recurrences, memoization, and math tricks -- via Lego castles.
September 25, 2025BCtCIDS&A
What is Context Engineering?
Why context engineering is becoming the name of the game for improving AI apps.
August 11, 2025AI
BCtCI Free Resources
A comprehensive list of all free resources available from Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, including chapters, problems, tools, and templates.
August 8, 2025BCtCIDS&A
BCtCI Chapter: Union-Find
Learn how this fascinating data structure speeds up graph-related operations.
August 6, 2025BCtCIDS&A
LLM Usage and Manipulation in Peer Review
Peer review has a new scandal: how LLMs are being used to manipulate the process.
August 2, 2025ResearchAI
Computational Aspects of Gerrymandering
Lessons from trying to automate redistricting.
August 1, 2025Research
Top-K Problems: Sorting vs Heaps vs Quickselect
The different approaches to finding the k smallest/largest elements in an array.
July 31, 2025BCtCIDS&A
Queues in JS interviews
JS doesn't have built-in queues, which can be an issue if you have to implement a BFS. Here are the workarounds.
July 30, 2025BCtCIDS&A
Double-Edge Cut Problem
An optimal solution for a graph problem that comes up in the Wall Game.
May 20, 2025ResearchWall Game
Single-Edge Cut Problem
A linear-time algorithm for a graph problem that comes up in the Wall Game.
May 15, 2025ResearchWall Game
The Wall Game Project
An introduction to the Wall Game, my new project.
May 14, 2025Wall Game
Wall Game DB Design
Designing the DB for the Wall Game.
May 12, 2025Wall Game
Choosing a tech stack in 2025
How would you build a Lichess clone in 2025? My process for picking a tech stack.
May 7, 2025Wall Game
Wall Game UI Design (+ Frontend Generators)
The specs of the UI for the Wall Game and renders from frontend generators.
May 2, 2025Wall GameAI
Lifecycle of a CS research paper: my knight's tour paper
The backstory and thought process behind a fun paper from my PhD.
May 2, 2025Research
My family during the Spanish Civil War
My grandparents' story during the Spanish Civil War.
May 1, 2025
Get Binary Search Right Every Time, Explained Without Code
A binary search recipe that works for every problem, explained without code.
April 15, 2025BCtCIDS&A
What Vibe Coding Actually Looks Like (prompts included)
The exact prompts used to create an interactive 3D torus visualization app with vibe coding.
March 23, 2025AI
A topology/geometry puzzle
Exploring the geometry of merging faces.
March 21, 2025Research
Problem Solving BCtCI Style
A problem walkthrough using the concepts from Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview.
March 19, 2025BCtCIDS&A
Heapify Analysis Without Math
A proof that heapify takes linear time without using complex equations.
October 30, 2024BCtCIDS&A
Negative Binary Search and Choir Rehearsal
A curious application of binary search.
October 23, 2024Research
Lazy vs Eager Algorithms
Exploring the tradeoffs between lazy and eager implementations of common algorithms.
October 16, 2024DS&A
Actually Implementing Dijkstra's Algorithm
A comprehensive guide to different implementations of Dijkstra's algorithm, with code.
June 22, 2020DS&A
Reachability Problems and DFS
An extensive list of questions that can be solved with DFS.
June 21, 2020DS&A
Why Many Greedy Algorithms Are Pickier Than They Need To Be
Many greedy algorithms can be modified to make local rather than global choices while still producing the same solutions.
February 20, 2020Research
Breaking Down Dynamic Programming
A step-by-step guide to understanding and implementing dynamic programming algorithms with practical examples.
February 5, 2020DS&A
Iterative Tree Traversals: A Practical Guide
A guide to implementing preorder, inorder, and postorder tree traversals iteratively.
February 4, 2020DS&A