Introduction
Hi! I'm Brian, most common online handle betaveros. I'm interested in information security, UI design, and puzzles.
About Me
I'm currently on break, but was most recently (winter 2022) a security software engineer at Zoom by way of Keybase. My other major hobby is puzzlehunts; I recently finished running the 2022 Galactic Puzzle Hunt with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈, after the previous year's GPH and the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt with them.
Previously, I finished a Masters of Engineering at MIT in computational music in 2020. Before that, I graduated from MIT (undergrad) with a double major in mathematics and computer science in 2019, and even earlier, I interned at SingleStore (formerly memSQL) and Dropbox.
I have many other interests. Computers-wise, I'm pretty interested in programming language stuff — functional programming, type systems, formal verification, and language design. Math-wise, I enjoy complexity theory and combinatorics. I have also been known to sing/rap/play instruments inside or outside the shower, and graphic design is, as they say, my passion.
Personal Links
Things I've made
- noulith: a programming language with heavy functional influence and way too much syntax sugar
- gph-site: the open-sourced version of the Django app written for Galactic Puzzle Hunts and used by many others
- Puzzlord: a Django app for editing and testing puzzlehunt puzzles, built from scratch for the 2021 Mystery Hunt
- bcodex: a command-line utility in Haskell (as well as tiny JS app) for flexibly converting between puzzlehunt/CTF-y “encodings”. 4861707079 cHV6emxpbmc=!
-
paradoc: a stack-based programming language that can be golfed or written “literately”. Let's solve a small Google Code Jam problem solution with 22 bytes:
vo"Case #%: "oJ{S$p}^P - See more projects...
Tech I've been involved with
- Zoom's end-to-end encryption; I split my time between engineering and cryptography research, including implementing the relatively young primitive of a Verifiable Random Function. See also Rotatable Zero Knowledge Sets, our paper in ASIACRYPT 2022.
- Mavo, a tool for creating web applications using only HTML and CSS; I implemented server-side rendering.
- SingleStore (formerly memSQL): I worked on SingleStore/memSQL Studio, a visual interface for managing clusters. In particular, I co-created and blogged about Visual Explain, a visualizer of the operations used to perform database queries.
- See more tech experience...
Groups I'm part of
- 6.004, MIT's "Computation Structures": I was a lab assistant for the 2018–2019 school year and a teaching assistant for the 2019–2020 school year.
- SIPB, MIT's (oldest) student computing group. We run many services, like scripts.mit.edu, which is currently serving this website.
- ESP, a student group that runs educational programs for middle- and high-school students. I've worked a lot on the open-source ESP website, a custom Django site we manage our programs with.
- Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an annual puzzle event held by ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ since 2017.
- See more groups...
Puzzles I've written
If you aren't familiar with puzzlehunt puzzles, I also wrote a fairly comprehensive Introduction to Puzzlehunts.
- Several puzzles in the DP Puzzle Hunt, including the easy Sleep Talk and debatably-easy Now I Know… (I also led the project and edited many other puzzles).
- Unsafe (2019 GPH, with Jakob Weisblat): A text adventure.
- The Answer to This Puzzle Is... (2018 GPH, with many other members of Galactic): A puzzle in a single sentence. Or is it?
- Puzzle of the Day (2017 GPH): The first, easiest puzzle of the first GPH.
- See more puzzles...
Blog highlights
My blog is very all over the place, but here's a very short list of posts that are some combination of popular and personal favorites.
Collecting this list made me realize that how much I like a post is bizarrely correlated with the length of the title I give it.Links of whenever
I have a collection of links. I have an even larger collection of links that grew too long and disorganized and got mostly culled, but here is a list of links that I sometimes rotate when I feel like it.
More about me
I also like Vim, RSS, sushi, fish (shell), Pentatonix, Ace Attorney, and lots more things.
Through my elementary to high school years, I lived on a small East Asia island whose political status is complicated enough to get its own Wikipedia article.
In my spare time, I improve my mostly irrelevant FAQ; randomly link to TVTropes in order to enhance others' lives; insert hyperbole into literally every sentence; politely encourage people to use dashes instead of hyphens when appropriate; and fly my dragon companion.
Not more about me
My first and last name are very common. I am not any of the following people:
- New York Times tech writer
- software engineer, U of Toronto '19 (and one-time Kattis author? or are these also two different people?)
- cofounder of ROOM and other companies, brief MIT Sloan attendee
- summer 2022 intern at Zoom (sorry, I took the good email)
- the guy I met on an airplane when the airline assigned both of us the same seat (true story)
