Some stuff about me
Puzzles
Mostly Jane Street puzzles ↗, or ones like them: there's no actual question, just an ambiguous problem where half the work is figuring out what's even being asked. Here's one I really liked.
jane street · june 2025
Some Ones, Somewhere
The whole puzzle is nine photos of a board with some coloured tiles on it. The only instruction: the answer is a sentence.
Once I had a hunch about what was going on, I built a tool to test it quickly, and it led me to the answer.
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01
The hunch
Letters scattered along the edges of the board spelled out
tilingandpartridge. A partridge tiling ↗ packs one 1×1 square, two 2×2s, three 3×3s, and so on up to nine 9×9s, perfectly into a 45×45 square. So every photo was probably an unfinished partridge tiling. -
02
The idea
Each tiling has exactly one 1×1 square, the "one". If I could finish each board, the one's row and column would give a pair of coordinates, and filling the blank spots along the edges with a repeating A–Z turns those coordinates into letters.
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03
The tool
Finishing nine 45×45 tilings by hand is slow and error-prone, so I built an interactive solver to place tiles, check what fits, and test the idea quickly.
Partridge Tiling solver ↗react · typescript -
04
The answer
The nine ones read
SU MO FC UB ES IS SQ UA RE. Add the spare tiles sitting on the side table in two of the photos and you get:"the sum of cubes is a square"
which is exactly what a partridge tiling proves: 1³ + 2³ + … + 9³ = 45².
Other puzzles I like working on
Overwatch
Rank 1 in North America
I play Overwatch in some of my free time. At one point I was rank 1 in North America, and I was consistently Top 500 in the other roles too, DPS and support.
Some clips of me playing → coming soon
Lately
Right now I'm really interested in ad exchanges: how a single ad slot gets auctioned, priced and filled in the time it takes a page to load. I've been studying up on it, and condensing all my notes into one place.
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