gum

heya it's gum! half german half polish. i'm a mo gold, former #2 codeforces and current #1 cryptohack in germany, back to back robotics state champs, and during the pandemic i got weirdly addicted to ultrabullet chess and somehow peaked #3 in the world.

codeforces started cause a friend sent me a link to this mysterious site. i was already deep into crypto ctfs and anything with a rating that goes up hooked me fast. we bet on who'd reach grandmaster first and i did it in under a year. short but fun chapter. i'm still competitive at heart but the interest in hunting ratings slowly faded and luckily shifted to something more productive and even more fun.

i was also lucky to work with some great people in the cryptocurrency scene from a young age back when that was cool. the money i earned and the fundamentals i learned during that period gave me a lot of freedom to just pursue whatever i was interested in, which eventually and gratefully led me to where i am now.

these days i mostly think about llms, the full stack from kernels to evals to architecture. i still like solving interesting cp, ctf and random puzzles that people occasionally send me, but way less than i used to back in my teens. e.g i like to upsolve each year's imo to see how washed i've become, but fingers crossed so far i'm pretty happy with how that goes haha.

sometimes i wish i'd gotten off the competitive grind earlier, but the right people hinted me at the right things at the right time. i'll always be grateful for that.

always open to good conversation. as you can probably tell i get interested in a lot of things.

feel free to reach out on dc or x :)