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2025 year review

• wrote and rewrote tripos.pro a couple times! talked to the department about their goofy DSL for courses and made my first grammar
• worked on a cool choose-your-own-adventure live music thingy for a uni course
• thought deeply about optimal time management. decided it was not worth thinking deeply about
• started working for iterate.com. did some cool agent harness work, met some really smart people
• made SINAESTHESIA and got ROBBED in the uni gamejam .
• went to a football game!
• played triangle in orchestra
• made a cool tool that lets me set up skips and loops in spotify songs. unfortunately it’s not actually useful but learned a bit of Go for it
• made a new pc!

• flew out to SF a couple times for the YC summer fellowship. met some crazy cool people working on interesting things and met the YC partners which was dope
• built stardust, an embeddable hybrid graph-vector database in c++. got super into the underlying storage engine layer and it served as my first real exposure to systems programming. databases are awesome
• spent a few months at a trading firm in london with some lovely people in a lovely office
• bought an unreasonable number of mtg cards and played one (1) commander game
• went to the cloudflare offices with iterate. started idolizing kenton varda and haven’t really got over him.
• went mountain biking in glentress, discovered I don’t like mountain biking but I do like glentress

• did in aggregate a very small amount of lecture catchup or supervision work or exam prep . Not Good
• went to the yc startup school, saw sam altman and spent the rest of the time wandering around SF and chilling in my hotel room I didn’t like the vibes ONE BIT!!!!
• became a neo scholar finalist but couldn’t make any of the events I fear. they seem cool though
• went to trin hall june event! I liked it. bought my first suit for it
• went to thorpe park and met a guy who literally knows every in construction ride across every major theme park internationally it was wild he was the goat of theme parks and had all the confidential building plans
• saw blade runner and princess mononoke at the bfi imax. good lord I love a movie.
• started work on my dissertation project and made good progress. yet another hybrid graph vector database??? this time in ocaml and properly thought through??? and zero copy???
• wrote some code for a friend building ticketing software for west end shows
• sang faure’s requiem in london with my choir
• wrote a genuinely embarrassing paper recreating fat tree QRAM for a uni module
• saw my sister in her choir in winchester cathedral! and had some mulled apple wine which thinking back was very much a cider

• won tastiest cookie at my family’s annual cookie party with this recipe - and I wasn’t even counting the votes this year
• made a programming lang from scratch in a few days with some friends, then built a pretty cool game in it! it’s my proudest project ever - yendor - and we ended up winning the gamejam which was pretty cool
• started working on mit battlecode but s/mit/cam/

overall progression and review:

• I am happier and more content with where I am
• I apply for significantly less stuff now. I’ve beat out the ambition of narcissism though this fight is an ongoing war
• I am heavier than I was
• I feel far more creatively actualised. every creative act is a large cognitive burden/barrier but it always feels incredibly fulfilling
• I am less sure about long term concrete plans, more sure about mental and personal goals and strategies
• I am a significantly worse student though perhaps this can change???