First Post!

TL;DR  This is the blog of John, a 14-year-old (as of writing) programmer and tinkerer who likes to untangle things and understand them.

Hi!  I'm John, or @johnzhou721 on GitHub.  I'm a high schooler from Texas, which is just too hot but also huge!  I like to code, do math, and write both technically and in prose (more exciting things to come in the future in this regard).  I also like to do other stuff, like playing piano, alto saxophone, and playing tennis.  And last but not least, I like to contribute to and start free and open source projects.

Regarding programming specifically, I have interests in GUI frameworks, image processing, and competitive programming.  I'm participating in USACO Silver and am a Content Author at the non-profit Competitive Programming Initiative (CPI).  At CPI, my love for technical writing meets my desire to deeply understand algorithmic solutions to competitive programming problems.

Essentially, I just love to find out how things work, and want to make them work myself.

In this blog...

In this blog, I will be posting mostly technical content.  I like to debug issues in open source projects, so I may be writing about those.  I'll also write about programming in general, as well as specific, interesting problems in math and programming competitions.  I may occasionally also blog about my other interests and life in general; for the latter, I try to limit myself to non-sensitive and mostly professional topics.

Supporting my work

I plan to set up GitHub sponsors in the near future; watch this space.  If you're interested in supporting me through either a general sponsorship or contract work, read johnzhou721/sponsorship-info first.  TL;DR I am not affiliated with the core teams of projects I contribute to, and donations should not be directed toward my volunteer work at CPI.

Bonus: A Small Puzzle

To entertain y'all after this long post, here's a small puzzle.  The aim is to find my favorite movie given the following clues.  Do not be intimidated by the math; there are multiple ways to solve this puzzle. Even without doing the calculations, Disney fans may recognize the answer.

Let $Y_0$ be the year my favorite movie was released, and define $Y=Y_0-2000$. Let $M$ be the 1-indexed number of the movie's release month. Let $D$ be the day of the date the movie was released on.

• $Y$ is equivalent to $5$ mod $8$, and is equivalent to $1$ mod $3$.

• $\displaystyle M=9\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \left(\frac14\right)^j+\mathrm e^{\mathrm i\pi}.$

• $D$ is a perfect cube.

• The movie's main characters were originally going to be part of an existing Disney lineup, but the franchise was so successful that it was marketed separately.

Verification for programmers:
The MD5 hash of the names of two main characters in the movie from oldest to youngest, separated by a space in titlecase without trailing or leading spaces or newlines is 908bea5f972e0dac6b7fcaa151cd8d5d.

For programmers, feel free to leave the hash of the name of the movie (title-case, no spaces) in the comment section, but do not name it as it'll give this away (and also because random people somehow think it's cringe and for little girls; I disagree).  For non-programmers, you can provide additional clues below after you solve it.

Enjoy!