Varun Biniwale

Hey, Iā€™m Varun! Iā€™m into computer science and cybersecurity, and Iā€™m an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo.

I once (accidentally) hacked ā€œevery school in the worldā€*: (skip to 7:37 for the fun parts)

I run my schoolā€™s coding club, have helped teach robotics workshops, and am leading the organization of my schoolā€™s third TEDx event. Iā€™ve built projects like Quickz, a Kahoot alternative used around the world, and Flopbook, a simple animation tool.

Iā€™ve also contributed to Scratch, first as an external contributor, and later as an intern on their engineering team.

In my free time, I participate in bug bounty programs, helping secure software for organizations like Google, Meta, and the Scratch Foundation. My work has been cited in places like The Verge and Ars Technica.

Find me on LinkedIn or email me at varun@varun.ch.

The blog below is a work in progress!

Blog #

  1. You shouldn't need to write a scraper just to list the available electives
  2. The world's most unhinged video wall (made out of Chromebooks)
  3. Browsers need to change how autofill works
  4. How to turn Firefox into a usable web browser
  5. Navigate MacOS popups using your keyboard
  6. Make your shell 370.52% faster with this easy trick (fix nvm startup times)
  7. How to hack the Breakthrough Prize (ft. Session Confusion)
  8. There's something fishy about the Flappy Bird revival
  9. Most 16-year-olds donā€™t have servers in their rooms
  10. Trusted by [your company]
  11. copymarklets: Bookmarks for copying text
  12. This YouTube video contains its own ID
  13. Exploring Google Hangouts' Easter Eggs
  14. Using Natural Language Processing to Improve UX
  15. Retrieving your browsing history through a CAPTCHA

2 more posts can be found in the blog archive.