Oh boy, I’ve always wanted to have a blog and things to write in it! My name is Ilya and I am currently a senior at Caltech, graduating in something like 20 days. I’m starting this blog so that I can write about all of the things that interest me: awesome projects, Computer Science, Starcraft, music, and others.

Caltech’s Ditch Day gives me an excellent opportunity to start off by showcasing a massive project that some friends and I poured hundreds of hours into making happen. As a quick tl;dr (although the very first post I will be writing after this will explain in detail), Caltech’s Ditch Day is not like a senior ditch day at any other school. You might think that on ditch day the seniors just skip their classes and go to the beach. That may be how things started around here, but due to decades of escalation, the seniors now spend months building a fun day of events for the underclassmen in secret. Now, the seniors are happy to just get some sleep on the day of ditch day. Overall, it’s a positive tradition, because it provides an impetus and a framework for accomplishing lots of incredibly impressive engineering tasks.

Unfortunately, putting all that time into Ditch Day means that I need to catch up on the rest of life at the moment.

Not completely sure when all of this is getting done

For now, I will leave you with an unsatisfyingly tantalizing table of contents and the promise that I will, in fact, get around to writing these soon enough. Once I write each post, I’ll link to it from this one.

1. What is Caltech’s Ditch Day?
2. Vector: A Stack About Time Travel and Caltech
3. The Vector Chrono Travel AI Interface (only for Android)
4. The Mirror Maze
5. The “Space Alert” Puzzle
6. Misc Puzzles: Fan Puzzle, Skype Puzzle, and Wire Puzzle
7. Other Misc Stuff: Non-Newtonian Fluid, Kidnappings, T-Shirts and Time Machines
8. Behind the Scenes: Stack Design, Build and Test Process, Cold Hard Cash and the Day of.
9. The Grand Finale
10. The Highlight Reel (Video)

Whew! That’s a lot of stuff! Hopefully, I’ll have plenty of free time in the next few weeks to get started.