IOI
IOI Bronze
International Olympiad in Informatics
Competed internationally against the best high schoolers on the planet. Five hours, hard problems, one keyboard, no mercy.
Waterloo, ON→Palo Alto, CA
From Waterloo ice
to Palo Alto sun.
I'm Mars Xiang - grinding competitive CS and Putnam math through brutal Ontario winters, and building real AI products under California palm trees. Two climates, one obsession: hard problems.
- IOI
- Bronze medalist
- CCO
- Bronze medalist
- Top 200
- Putnam, NA
- -20°C
- survived, barely
01 - The grind
At Waterloo, everyone around you is a genius. So you get faster.
Theory and CS, the deep end. The kind of place where someone casually mentions they 3'd a Codeforces Div. 1 over breakfast and nobody blinks. You learn to think in invariants and amortized bounds before you learn to dress for the cold.
Nights in the DC
The William Davis Computer Research Centre at 2am. Half the lab debugging an off-by-one, the other half asleep on the keyboard. The vending machine is your dietitian.
Putnam prep
Saturdays buried in olympiad problem sets, chasing that one clean idea that collapses a monster into three lines. Most don't fall. The ones that do feel like a drug.
Algorithmic instinct
Segment trees, flows, DP on trees - the toolkit becomes muscle memory. You stop reaching for it and start seeing problems through it.
V1 / REV refuels
Dinner is whatever the residence cafeteria is serving, eaten fast between a problem set and a contest. Bubble tea on King Street is the reward, not the routine.
The Math faculty hands you a pink tie and a chip on your shoulder. You earn the first; the second is non-negotiable.
02 - Hardware
Three medals. None of them came easy.
CCO
CCO Bronze
Canadian Computing Olympiad
National-level algorithmic problem solving. The proving ground where Canada picks its sharpest before the world stage.
Putnam
Putnam Top 200
William Lowell Putnam Competition
Top 200 in North America's hardest undergraduate math competition - where the median score is famously zero.
WATERLOO
The cold months
- Grey skiessun sets at 4:42pm, mood follows
- -20°C blizzardswind that cuts right through Gore-Tex
- Attack geesethey own campus; you just live here
- King St bubble teathe one warm thing about January
- Co-op grind300 applications, 4 interviews, 1 dream
PALO ALTO
The endless summer
- 70°F, year-roundthe weather app is just one screenshot
- Palm treesstill a little surreal every morning
- Startup energyeveryone is building something real
- Kombucha & cold brewthe office fridge is a personality test
- Shipping productusers on the other end, today
03 - The day job
Building at Interaction.
Member of Technical Staff at Interaction.co - the team behind Poke. I work on AMB development and Recipes: the machinery that turns a fuzzy human request into something that actually gets done.
It's the flip side of the contest grind. No partial marks, no scoreboard - just real users on the other end and code that has to hold up in the wild. Living the J-1 hustle, 4,000 km from the snow.
~/interaction/recipes
$ whoami
mars - member of technical staff
$ ls ./focus
amb-development/
recipes/
$ cat motivation.txt
"ship things people actually use."
$ uptime
70°F, sunny, 0 geese04 - Field notes
Small things, in my own words.
The 8am walk to class in -15°C, snot freezing, problem set due in two hours, and somehow this is the part I’ll miss.
Submitted. Accepted. The hard problem falls at 1:47am and I’m fully alone in the lab and grinning like an idiot. No high like it.
Found a sunny -8°C afternoon and a fresh bubble tea on King Street. Some days Waterloo gives a little back.
Co-op application #214. Cover letter so tailored it has its own measurements. We do this for the plot.