OA Gauntlet and CTFs

Last week I said no games until I land an intern. That lasted about four days. Otherwise this week was OAs and CTFs, in roughly equal measure.

What I worked onCopied!

• The OA gauntlet. Bank of America, Money Forward (a Japanese company, test scheduled in Asia/Tokyo time), Amazon, Adobe, and Roblox. Roblox's was the strangest format I've seen: Robots, Factories, Decision-Making, Outpost Mars, and Coding Skills, as five separately-timed tasks rather than one sitting. I applied to a lot of things at the start of the week and then spent the rest of it actually giving the assessments, mostly at night.

• GSoC final stretch. Got the email that final work submission opens August 17. Pushed a MR, wrote up week 9 and week 10 blogs, filed status reports, and I'm now waiting on review. After months on this project, wrapping it up properly is its own kind of work.

The MR itself adds per-keyframe interpolation types to Kdenlive's Time Remapping panel, so speed changes can ease in and out instead of switching abruptly at every keyframe boundary. Each keyframe can be Linear, Smooth, Cubic In or Cubic Out, and a curve band draws the actual interpolated shape between the input and output rulers. The curve is sampled per pixel from MLT's own parsed animation rather than redrawn from the keyframe values, so what you see is genuinely what will play back.

One open question before it merges: I restricted the type list to those four. MLT also has Bounce, Elastic, Exponential and Circular, which all overshoot outside the 0..1 range, and on a time map an overshoot means source time briefly runs backwards, so the clip plays in reverse for a few frames. That's a real effect some people would want and a confusing artifact for everyone else, so the short list is a placeholder pending my mentor's call.

• CTFs, properly this time. Cleared the entire easy web exploitation tier, all 20, then started on medium. Highlights: my first real SQL injection (a string-interpolated INSERT), an IDOR through an md5(id) profile URL, credential stuffing with breached creds against a bank login, OS command injection, a sudo privesc through emacs via GTFOBins, and a broken rate-limit state machine. Also picked up some general skills challenges, including one that was just ASCII 101 repeated 1751 times, which I scripted out over netcat.

I'm writing up every single one. Every command, every flag, explained. Partly so I can read them back later, partly because I'm genuinely enjoying it in a way I haven't enjoyed studying in a while.

• A Minecraft mod. Started writing my own, which means I now have my own ore, my own ingot, and a full armor set made out of it. Xevrium. The armor gives Speed II, Resistance, Night Vision and Fire Resistance while worn, which is objectively balanced and not at all overpowered.

• k8s-mesh-mcp: a read-only MCP server for Kubernetes service-mesh introspection, written in Go. Early days.
• grindmap: tried adding a live visit counter to the header, then reverted it about four minutes later. Some ideas die fast, and that's fine. Checked the analytics while I was in there and it's at 16,312 visitors and 33,835 page views over the last 30 days, up 71% and 58%. The company pages are carrying it, Google alone has 3.6K.

• Started using Neovim as a daily driver and wrote up notes on it, including a genuinely cursed trap where having your home directory be a git repo breaks root detection.
• Started fifth semester classes. DBMS, OS, PoPL, DAA.

The one that got awayCopied!

hawky.ai. I spent a long while on the application, including a long system design answer about predicting ad performance from video. The founder actually called me.

And then it died on something that had nothing to do with me: my college won't give an NOC. That's it. That's the whole reason. I was genuinely close to this one and it got killed by paperwork.

What I found interestingCopied!

• kitty : GPU-based, fast, feature-rich terminal. If you live in the terminal this is aimed squarely at you.
• calibre : the ebook manager, from the same author.
• cord.nvim : Discord rich presence for Neovim, which is exactly the kind of unnecessary thing I want now that I've switched.
• fish-shell and zsh : been reconsidering my shell setup.
• Automated-List-Of-Summer-2027-and-Fall-2026-Tech-Internships : an automatically updated internship listing. Extremely relevant to my interests right now.
• kiwix-desktop : offline Wikipedia and more, for Linux and Windows.

RandomCopied!

I broke the no-games promise. Been playing too much Elden Ring, which I admitted publicly on Friday and am now admitting again here.

But I finished it. Base game done, DLC still ahead of me.

I went with the Frenzied Flame ending, which I did not fully think through. You strip down to nothing and walk into the Proscription to take the flame, and it costs you exactly the thing you'd least want to lose.

Melina leaves you for it. I knew that going in, on paper, and it still broke me a little when it happened. A hundred-odd hours with one character who's been with you since the beginning and then that.

The Elden Beast took a few tries. Deaths were somewhere past 221 by the end.

Sat through the whole credits. Felt like I'd earned that.

Also started Cuphead, which after Elden Ring feels like switching from a marathon to being repeatedly slapped.

Started The Mentalist, and my Netflix list has quietly become a backlog I will never finish.

Reserved @xevrion on Cloudflare Wallets, mostly because claiming your handle early is free and regret is not.

Campus internet also decided to be good this week, which helps when you're uploading builds at 2am.

Also apparently I've burned through 3.45 billion tokens, which puts me third on a leaderboard I didn't know I was competing on.

X kept climbing through all this, and I spent a night hoping to wake up past 800 followers.

Two weekly blogs went unwritten while all this was happening, which is why this one and the last are both landing at once. Back on schedule now.