My 2025 recap

What a year, huh?

Hi!

This year I graduated from school and went to my dream university. Now studying consumes the majority of my time, but this is fine, I guess. First year is focused on fundamental disciplines: Calculus, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math (my favorite one, check it out!), C++, Algorithms and Data Structures.

Contests and olympiads

This year, National Technology Olympiad was the only olympiad I participated. However, it consists of multiple different fields, and I participated in three of them.

In Feburary, Aquatic Robotics Systems took place. In my team, I was doing computer vision stuff for a tiny underwater robot prototype. And we finally won! This was tough, as the ranking difference with the 2nd place team was just 0.5 points. Yandex journal published a short article with our solution.

Testing computer vision

In March, I tried Big Data and Machine Learning for the first time. In fact, I never did ML before, and probably never will do it professionally. So, we had to make a regression model that predicts post stats (e.g. number likes, comments, shares) from its contents: text and an optional picture. While the task looks easy, the constraints were tight: single-core CPU, about 2 gigs of RAM and 10 minutes to process all the test data. I actually liked this idea. Sure, you can throw a bunch of hardware and use some powerful neural nets. But I find it boring. So my inner hacker spirit enjoyed squeezing out accuracy while keeping the model lightweight and fast. And we got 3rd place out of 40. Quite impressive for the first try!

April. Flying Robotics. We had to set up a thermal camera as an aid for computer vision, build a web dashboard for observations and make a drone port, all that in ~3 days. We were the only team whose robot didn’t crash during the final flight. Moreover, we did all the tasks. And won. Good job, team!

The Bird on the mission

Personal projects

This year I barely worked on personal stuff, but still did something (mostly in C, just like in 2024).

Mapka is an external Minecraft level renderer that aims to be fast, portable and to support almost every version. There’s still much job to do: support newer versions (after 1.12.2), explore multithreading potential, add alternative user interfaces (GUI, daemon, better CLI), add alternative export formats (e.g. OSM-like tiled web map), add tests, write documentation, refactor the codebase.

10000x5000 blocks map rendered

fooclassic is a lightweight Minecraft Classic server. There’s also some work to do: add Windows support, use more efficient platform-specific I/O API (e.g. epoll, kqueue), implement Lua scripting.

naus is a simulator for swarms of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which allows to program missions for multiple underwater robots simultaneously. I implemented all the features I wanted to see!

From the naus website. “Computer vision demo scene. One AUV detects shapes, another recognizes ArUco markers, and a third moves along a ring.”

Next year plans

Next year, I personally wish three things:

  1. To survive in the university. Classes are getting harder, so I hope I don’t get lost in them.
  2. To have some spare time to work on personal projects. Mapka looks promising, but it’s still unfinished yet. Hope it reaches MVP this year.
  3. To post some more here? I already left almost every social media. Platforms like Mastodon or Bluesky are also frustrating for me, so this website is the only public place I post on.

Also, I would like to setup a homelab to become a bit more independent.

And maybe improve English. :P

Conclusion

There’s more to come.

See you in 2026!