About Me
Hi! I'm Alex, a.k.a. nim. I use she/her or they/them pronouns.
I'm 19 years old and currently in my sophomore year at university, majoring in computer science and minoring in math, computer engineering, and linguistics.
Outside of academics, I've been programming as a hobby for a long time. I love working with hardware at a low level, designing circuits and using microcontrollers, and generally understanding and building things from the ground up (this entire site was written by me, even the Markdown parser I'm writing this text through!)
Another hobby of mine is technical Super Mario 64, in which I make tool-assisted speedruns and reverse engineer the game in order to find and exploit glitches. I've also worked on the SM64 decompilation.
I'm also interested in linguistics, with a particular interest in Northwest Caucasian languages. I've been into conlanging for a long time, and I've been a member of the toki pona community for nearly 3 years.
I'm also a huge nerd for public transit! Since November 2023, I've logged every transit ride I've taken in detail in a massive spreadsheet. My main local transit agencies are Muni, BART, AC Transit, and SamTrans.
I also really love solving puzzles. I love speedcubing and twisty puzzle theory, as well as cryptic crosswords. A lot of people know me from my Advent of Code videos, where I try to solve the programming problems as fast as possible and get on the leaderboard; I finished 18th globally in 2022, and 29th in 2023.
Some other small off-and-on hobbies of mine include music composition, chess, and Geometry Dash. If you ever want to play chess with me, send me a challenge on my Lichess!
I can be found online on YouTube, GitHub, and Mastodon.
The best way to contact me is on Discord at nim#6398, or by email at alex at this domain.