Point Blank Blog

Latest — 18 Apr 2026

Understanding Basic Networking in Cybersecurity

What I learned from a session by my senior Pragati Raj After the cryptography session, Pragati Raj moved on to another core subject: Networking. He said something very simple but important. Networking is how systems communicate with each other. At first, it sounded obvious. But as the session went deeper,

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From Confusion to Clarity, My First Deep Dive into Cryptography

What I learned from a session by my senior Pragati Raj It Started With a Simple Question “Do you know how HTTP works? And why HTTPS is secure?” That was the first thing my senior asked when the session began. At that moment, I thought I had a basic idea.

Exploring Git: From Blobs and Trees to Practical Workflows

How does git store files and keep track of everything while being efficient? What's inside the .git folder?? With these interactive questions the session was kick started by Alfiya didi . One of the most interesting questions she asked was: Can Git store or commit an empty folder? We&

Winning Hackathons and Building a Career in Tech

Written by Chirag Anand Inspired by a talk at Point Blank by Naman Parlecha, Mohit Nagaraj, and Vivek Agarwal. A polished LinkedIn profile or a viral tweet doesn’t guarantee your career in tech. However, when paired with real skills and consistent effort, they can open doors which you didn&

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

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