Point Blank Blog

Latest — 05 Mar 2026

The 24 Hour Hackathon might go extinct. I hope it survives.

A couple of weekends ago, Bangalore witnessed two important hackathons. Devfolio's Build India (Anthropic x Replit x LightSpeed) and Google's Gemini 3 Hackathon. Build India had a hacking time of about 7 hours, and Google's hackathon was only a bit longer. But hackathons have

More issues

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

Lately I have been involved in many conversations in my current company regarding Transformers, but what I feel is that people love to understand what Transformers are, but they do not want to understand the tradeoffs. Maybe the problem that we are solving could've been solved by RNNs

The Superteam that won it all - Point Blank's 2025 Wrapped

In 2025, Point Blank won thirty Hackathons, including three podiums at NITK's HackVerse and five winning teams at Smart India Hackathon. Twenty -four people got Internships and Job offers from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa, NASDAQ, CloudSEK, FinalRoundAI. Twenty -three of the worlds five-hundred Linux Foundation

Ambition is a luxury.

There are days when I feel like life has already ended, even though my body keeps showing up for it every day. I can't point to any exact moment when it all started or happened. There is no singular disaster or cinematic collapse I can point to, but

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

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