Summer internships’ deadlines knell by as I key this post. A common section in all application forms is the Curriculum Vitae/Résumé. Having made 2 versions of my résumé in Microsoft Word, the FOSS enthusiast in me felt the pinch.

I decided- my résumé should be in LaTeX - the typesetting framework based on Knuth’s TeX.

Having just a theoretical knowledge of how LaTeX worked, I probed into the open-source community. Forked Debarghya Das’ résumé which I liked because of its brevity and summarization in just one page.

This exercise taught me the importance of documentation, yet again. I was not merely modifying someone’s LaTeX code. The documentation was edifying and I actually learnt a lot in the process.

Ok, enough said. I urge you to try out LaTeX if you haven’t already. It has a steep learning curve for certain - but I am sure the hacker in you will be happy to help you climb the TeXy mountain.

Alright, back to completing my application forms :)

A Quadratic Sieve is currently factorizing 7393913335919140050521110339491123405991919445111971 as I write this post. And the choice of this 52-digit number is not random.

The largest prime factor of this number will lead me to the next level in hacker.org challenges.

I am currently working on creating the Python bindings to the PCG family of Random-number generators. A recent approach claims to be perform significantly well over other PRNGs across different statistical metrics.

hacker.org teaches me a lot of nifty tricks in my favorite language of late - Python.

To know more about all the bit-level twiddling stuff, refer to Hacker’s Delight by Henry Warren Jr.