hey! I'm nightxade, known irl as Matthew Cai. I'm currently attending the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. As of May 2026, I have just completed my second year of school; I plan to graduate after 2 more semesters of school (out-of-state tuition is expensive :<).

I'm interested in quite a few different areas of computer science, here's my current shortlist: security, microarchitecture, ML systems, AI safety, reinforcement learning, and distributed systems. Thus, I'm trying to cram as many classes as I possibly can into my 6 college semesters, and read my way through all the subjects I'm passionate about. I started reading so much that I began tracking my reading too, as a way of recording my progress and learning journey. If you have any reading or subject recommendations, please send them my way! I'm also a devout believer in Rust (cult member?), though my favorite languages additionally extend to C/C++ and (somewhat reluctantly, in spite of its type system) Python too. I want to eventually be a programming language polyglot; at the moment, I'd like to learn more functional programming and hardware description languages.

I'm a semi-active cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) player — I main crypto/pwn on Squid Proxy Lovers and Cosmic Bit Flip. I've realized recently that I enjoy reading vulnerability research blogs and papers even more :skull:. I used to author writeups for all the challenges I solved; perhaps I'll pick it up again in the future, provided LLMs haven't killed off CTFs by that point... :(

I used to be math competition kid, primarily in middle school. (For a while, my proudest achievement was qualifying for the AIME in 8th grade)! I've since stepped away from the scene, but I still retain an interest in mathematics — during my freshman year of college, I studied abstract algebra and Galois theory. Perhaps I'll take the Putnam for fun at some point! I also really enjoy playing the 24 1000 game from time to time :D

Outside of computer science, I'm broadly interested in quantum computing, most science subjects (bio, chem, astronomy, physics), and world history. In my limited free time, I watch F1 and MotoGP, read manhua, grind monkeytype and bullet chess, and follow CounterStrike esports. I'm a former Valorant addict, and previously played Geometry Dash, Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, Terraria, and Minecraft. I also really really like cats! :3