First Post -- Life Currently and a Feature Showcase

Hi, my first blog post, yay! The thought of having a website with a blog has been sitting in the back of my mind for the past few months, and I've finally set the time aside to make it a reality. I hope to use these blog posts a way to talk about my projects, interests, and life in general, hopefully sharing some insightful information along the way.

whoami

Helzeiah Oliveira | 20yo | problem solver i guess
Current Mathematics Major at Northeastern, Minor in CS
Potentially Pursuing a Physics minor
Used to be a Computer Science and Math combined Major
Current Software Engineer Co-op at Auria Space
Interested in learning more about:
Quant, AI (contributing to safe AI would be amazing),
Psychology, The World, and Ethics

Features and Stuff

I find it so cool how I can simply use ◊codeblock{} via Pollen to display such codeblocks. Here's a random idea of C++ code (from a problem i've seen before) I made while writing this:

#include <vector>
#include <unordered_map>
#include <random>

template <typename T>
class RandomSet {
  std::vector<T> m_vec;
  std::unordered_map<T, size_t> m_elemToIdxMap;
  std::mt19937 m_randGen{std::random_device{}()};

public:

  RandomSet() = default;
  ~RandomSet() = default;

  void insert(const T& element) {
    auto [it, inserted] = m_elemToIdxMap.insert({element, m_vec.size()});
    if (inserted) {
      m_vec.push_back(element);
    }
  }

  void remove(const T& element) {
    try {
      size_t idx = m_elemToIdxMap.at(element);
      // swap and pop
      T last = m_vec.back();
      m_vec[idx] = last;
      m_elemToIdxMap[last] = idx;
      m_vec.pop_back();

      m_elemToIdxMap.erase(element);
    } catch (std::exception& e) {
      throw std::invalid_argument("Given element does not exist in the set. -- RandomSet::remove()");
    }
  }

  T getRandom() {
    if (m_vec.empty()) {
      throw std::out_of_range("Cannot get random element from an empty RandomSet. -- RandomSet::getRandom()");
    }
    std::uniform_int_distribution<size_t> distr(0, m_vec.size() - 1);
    size_t idx = distr(m_randGen);
    return m_vec[idx];
  }

  bool contains(const T& element) const {
    return m_elemToIdxMap.contains(element);
  }

};

If you're are a "lazy person", in the sense that, you also, like me, want things to be as optimized, simple and easy as possible, Racket and Pollen is the answer to making sites for you. I know a lot of people like myself who simply avoid frontend development. I wanted a way to have a blog with cool inline codeblocks, math, and other features that didn't require me to know any crazy frontend stuff that I couldn't bother to learn. Pollen was the answer to this problem, along with A TON of help from Claude Code. It's beautiful how there's now a very small barrier between anyone having their own site, and showcasing creative work. You don't have to go through tutorial hell^[1] to learn frontend frameworks, you can solely be a backend problem solver like me who wanted a place to share their ideas.

Math, because I can

Being a math major and all, I wanted some math rendering $ \text{Helzeiah} + \text{Claude} + \text{Pollen} = \text{perfect tooling for an awesome website}$.

I can also do some centered "\[" type of math, here's the Black-Scholes formula (i DO NOT have this memorized):

$$\frac{\partial V}{\partial t} + \frac{1}{2}\sigma^2 S^2 \frac{\partial^2 V}{\partial S^2} + rS\frac{\partial V}{\partial S} - rV = 0$$

That's it for now

Future posts will be less "look at my setup" and more actual content — projects, ideas, things I'm thinking about. If you want to look into or steal my Pollen setup, the source is on my GitHub.