Two OAs and a Lot of Open Source

Placement season is properly here now. This week was open source, one product built way too fast, and three OAs across four days. One of them went badly enough to be funny.

What I worked onCopied!

• calcform (private, not ready to be released yet): a calculator-style form builder. Started Monday morning, and by Tuesday night it was a real product: a sandboxed formula engine with 67 tests, a drag-and-drop block editor with live formula validation and autosave, a one-question-at-a-time respondent runtime, a responses table with CSV export, ten launch templates, light/dark theming, auth, a waitlist, and bring-your-own-gateway payments. Roughly 70 commits in about 36 hours. I don't think I've ever built anything that fast and I'm not sure it was healthy.
• cutback: git for video editors, specifically for Kdenlive. It watches your project, commits every save to a local git repo, and describes what changed in plain English instead of making you read XML diffs. Written in Rust. Nothing major like this seems to exist, which is either an opportunity or a warning. This week it got CI, rustfmt across the tree, an install script, a man page, and a rewritten README. Still WIP.
• Open source, five PRs merged:
  • croc #1183 : added a --rename flag so you can receive a file under a new name instead of clobbering an existing one. Full loop on this one, I used the tool, hit the problem, filed the issue, got it confirmed, fixed it, merged. Best feeling in open source.
  • vitest #10814 : fixed a race on the typechecker spawn grace period on Windows.
  • List-of-OpenSource-Programs #19 : yashisrani had built a solid list of 2026 open source programs, but it was a giant README table, which is miserable on a phone. I turned it into an actual site with stipends, deadlines, and filters, plus Open Graph cards and a Pages deploy.
  • Two PRs into qala, Anish's skills hub: auth pages with Google alongside GitHub, and the whole SEO foundation (robots, sitemap, social cards, structured data).

• Also opened five PRs to excalidraw and two to vite, all still open. The excalidraw ones are editor fixes: finalizing multi-point drawings when you switch tools, preventing accidental text creation on double-click when leaving the line editor, re-measuring converted text once fonts load, ungrouping bound text when you drag a group member out of a frame, and pasting images from HTML data URL sources.
• The zeal PR from last week is still open. Patient game.
• thy-xev (this site): added an open source contributions section that pulls my PRs live from GitHub, so it stays current without me touching it. Also prev/next navigation and related posts on blog pages, a fix so widgets degrade quietly instead of showing errors when a fetch fails, cached OG images so link unfurlers stop timing out, and switched OG image rendering to jpeg via sharp, 1.8MB down to about 140KB. Fixed Spotify now-playing and gave it a proper owner-only OAuth flow. Restored ISR caching, added an RSS feed, real sitemap lastmod, and IndexNow for Bing. Renamed four blog slugs and gave them direct-answer intros.
• Also added a hidden Elden Ring "YOU DIED" screen behind the Konami code. Real fonts, canvas render, the actual in-game animation timing. Go find it.
• Fixed my resume properly, spacing and all. Got it to 96/100 on ATS scoring, though I genuinely don't know if ATS scores matter or if I just spent an evening optimizing a number.

The OAsCopied!

Goldman Sachs first, on Thursday. My first ever offline OA, in a lab, and it was a disaster in a way I can only describe as a fumble.

First coding question was a one-liner and I didn't notice the 1e9 constraint, so I sat there trying to build a vector. Second one was easy and I made an error somewhere I never found. Third one I didn't even read. I did do well on the MCQs, for whatever that's worth. Didn't get shortlisted. Only about 11 people from my college made it through to the interview round, so it's a rough year, but that's not really a consolation.

Then today, two OAs back to back. Flipkart Grid round 3 at noon, which started with HirePro throwing internal server errors and their support being busy, and BNY at 2. BNY was in two parts: DSA in C++ (an array problem on toggling contiguous blocks to maximize unique counts, and a tree problem doing DFS over parent arrays with propagation-style queries) plus a codebase section. I practiced the codebase format the night before, picked Node.js, and that part went fine.

Tired. But this is the year, so more of these are coming.

What I found interestingCopied!

• croc : securely send files from one computer to another. Genuinely useful, and the repo I ended up contributing to.
• howdy : Windows Hello style facial authentication for Linux.
• homepage : a highly customizable startpage with Docker and service API integrations. Still shopping for a homelab dashboard.
• ghostty-shaders : a pile of free shaders for Ghostty.
• bigint : a C++ library for very large integers, factorial of 1000000 kind of large. Filed away for competitive programming.
• i-have-adhd : a skill that stops your coding agent from burying the answer under six paragraphs. Very real problem.
• sharpemu : an experimental PS5 emulator. Ambitious.
• awesome-selfhosted : the canonical list of self-hostable software.
• qala : Anish's hub for skills, the project I sent two PRs to this week.
• Rakshit built a widget that puts your GitHub streak on your phone's home screen and matches your wallpaper theme so it looks baked in rather than slapped on. Really cool, and it gave me the idea to make a GitHub graph widget for noctalia-shell v4. Haven't started it yet.

RandomCopied!

X did something strange this week. I posted a "0 to 600 followers in 30 days" intro on Thursday, and 24 hours later it was 700. A hundred people overnight, when the previous hundred took a month.

Also crossed 100 followers on GitHub, and this site passed 3,004 unique visitors.

Third year starts in about a week, which I'm choosing not to think about.

Didn't play much Elden Ring, just a short session on Monday running into Glintstone Dragon Smarag with Lhutel the Headless out. Mostly it was Minecraft with the gang again.

Got a one month Netflix 4K trial, so naturally I finally started Breaking Bad, which I'd somehow gone this long without watching.

And got a few episodes into Jujutsu Kaisen on the side.

Also finally ricing my Spotify with spicetify, running the Lucid theme with the Spicy Lyrics extension. Full-bleed lyrics that follow along with the track, which is a genuinely huge upgrade over stock. Ended the week with Billie Jean on loop in it while cleaning up SEO stuff on this site. Good song to debug sitemaps to.

Didn't land an intern this week. Still not stopping.