Point Blank Blog

Latest — 03 Nov 2025

How We Won Hackman V8: Building IRis, an ML-Powered Compiler Optimization System

The Beginning: Late Arrivals and Sleep-Deprived Ambitions My teammates Shubhang Sinha, Yash Suthar, and I, Inchara J, walked into the Hackman V8 venue fashionably late - almost everyone had already started coding. We were already running on fumes, having spent the previous night brainstorming with our dear alumni senior, Maaz

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Point Blank is Nothing Without its People

In an age of rampant consumerism, little of what you see and read matters. Most content is the same recycled slop. Ever so often though, someone says something that really sticks. This is a deeply personal experience, and no two people have the same phrases that they carry as a

How I Secured the Endpoints of the Website

I’m Saniya Fatima, currently a Sophomore. This blog covers a recent issue I worked on, "Securing the endpoints of the Point Blank Website". Endpoint security might sound complex at first, but at its core, it’s about making sure that the right people have the right access.

DO NOT AUTOSCALE : PBCTF 4.0 RCA

The Incident On 02.08.25, during PBCTF 4.0 - our college club Point Blank's flagship CTF competition - we experienced what every CTF organizer fears: a complete platform outage. For 35 agonizing minutes from 10:00AM to 10:35AM IST, Me and Govind tried bringing the

[Mock Interview Series - 1] Sky : Pratik : Devops

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a mock interview with Pratik Singh, a Distribution Engineer at GitLab and one of my most respected seniors. Needless to say, The pressure to maintain my rep. was real. This blog is written in the format of QnA of the interview transcript,

Bad things might happen if you ignore this

Hello Everyone! 👋🏻 I’m Shreyash Srivastava, a 2nd year CSE student at DSCE and yes it's time for another blog. A lot of things happened in last few months, So before I begin I will just share this image here: A Quick Catch-Up I was awarded LiFT Scholarship

Linear Regression (Scary Math + Doable Practicality)

Just like how you still remember and think about the days when you and your first crush were together, every MLE and DS who has studied the scary Math behind Transformers and other advanced models remembers those old days when they had to deal with Linear Regression. Linear Regression seldom

My Experience at ACM Summer School at KARE

How It All Started Attending ACM Summer School was never really in my plans. I was just vibing with my friends on the freshblood chat of Pointblank when the ACM India Summer School registration form dropped. Everyone was talking about signing up, so I hopped in too. That’s when

PBCTF 4.0: An Inherited Dream

By Shreyas and Aswin Every institution is fragile, not because it lacks rules or foundation, but because it depends on memory, and one thing about memory is that it fades easily. What remains at the end is not the scoreboard or glory or the challenges. What remains is the intention,

Stop Wasting Time: 8 Secrets About GSoC Nobody Tells You

First of all, Who am I and Why should you give a f**k Hello, My name is Shuvam Pal and yes I cracked Google Summer of Code in my very first year of engineering. I achieved in my first year what most people only dream of achieving in their