betaveros's site

Hi! I'm Brian, most common online handle betaveros. I study math and computer science at MIT (undergraduate, class of 2019). My interests include front-end/UI design, computer security, functional programming, theoretical computer science, combinatorics, and puzzles.

Contact: The best way is to email (my most common online handle)@mit.edu.

My résumé (PDF).

Things I've made:

bcodex: a command-line utility in Haskell (as well as tiny JS app) for flexibly converting between puzzlehunt/CTF-y “encodings”. 4861707079 cHV6emxpbmc=!

gridderface: a Scala app that lets you create or draw on grid-based puzzles (Nikoli logic puzzles, crosswords, etc.) with the keyboard

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

clicker.html, a dumb thing from 2010 that nevertheless provoked one person to respond:

why the [email protected]#$ am I playing this game
what the hell man

The retroactively official goal is 16,384 clicks :)

Things I've been involved with:

SIPB, the (oldest) student computing group at MIT, which manages lots of services (including scripts.mit.edu, which is currently serving this website). I've hacked on many small things here, like the SIPB office's music spooler, a Perl script related to Gutenbach.

ESP, a student group that runs a huge variety of educational programs for middle- and high-school students. I've worked a lot on the ESP website, a custom Django site we manage our programs with. It's open-source on GitHub!

Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an annual puzzle event held by ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈, first held in 2017 and now in its third year. I've been involved in puzzlewriting, testsolving, and a little bit of web development since its inception.

MemSQL, for a summer 2018 internship during which I worked on MemSQL Studio, a visual interface for managing and monitoring MemSQL clusters. In particular, I worked on and blogged about Visual Explain, a tool for visualizing the operations used to perform database queries.

Dropbox, for a summer 2016 internship during which I worked on Dropbox Paper, a nifty doc editor for collaboration and brainstorming.

Stone Campus, a Taiwanese provider of programming classes and material, run by my father.

Random Fish, the writers of the 2015 MIT Mystery Hunt; I hacked quite a bit on Puzzletron, software for managing the editing and testing of puzzles

Habitica, an (open-source!) RPG for gamifying your life. I only added maybe ten lines of code ever, but I couldn't resist :)

Links:

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 sing/rap/play instruments inside or outside the shower; 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.

Links of Whenever

I have a large collection of links. Here is a sample because columns that are close to equally tall are nice. Both the big list and this sample are updated when I feel like it.