MochBot
A bot people train against. Luke and I have been building it for two years — engine in Rust and C++, dashboard and match plumbing in TypeScript.
- ~10,000 friends
- ~1,300 weekly active
- ~6,000 games/day
Joshua Liu
Computer science student at the University of Illinois.
I build systems software and I'm moving toward embedded: the part of the
field that has to survive contact with something physical.
Lexington, MA → Champaign, Illinois Grainger · CS 2030
I’m a first-year CS student at Illinois, out of Lexington, Massachusetts.
Most of what I build starts with wanting to know how something works. I reverse-engineered TETR.IO's protocol and rebuilt its client from scratch, which turned into a library other people now depend on. Then the harder question underneath it got interesting — what the best available move actually is — and I’ve rewritten a search engine three times looking for the answer.
I spent four years on VEX robotics, and what I liked was that the code had to survive contact with a real robot in a dynamic environment. Embedded programming deals with the imperfect world in a way the rest of CS doesn't. Sensors lie, motor stall, batteries sag. I'd rather work on that than on problems that stay solved.
Currently
- Illini Electric Motorsports
Formula SAE firmware - iRobotics
Micromouse - falcon
Fourth rewrite of the engine
Selected work
All projects →Triangle
I reverse-engineered the TETR.IO protocol and wrote a headless client for it. It's the only open-source one, and most third-party tooling for the game is built on it.
- 33 stars
- 200+ downloads/week
- @haelp/teto
UIEats
UIUC publishes its dining menus with unreliable allergen data. I scraped the system it's generated from and built a better app that you can trust when your life is at stake.
push-back
Rust on a VEX V5 brain. My own motion library, Monte Carlo localization for working out where the robot actually is, and a Svelte debugger that reads telemetry off it over a protocol I wrote down.
Rust · vexide Source ↗
What went wrong
Placeholder — copy pending
A short account of a project that didn’t work and what it cost to find out.
Beyond code
Eagle Scout, Troop 160 — Former Assistant Senior Patrol Leader, 36 merit badges.
LIT Programming Competition — I wrote CTF and competitive programming problems for a global contest thousands of students participate in every year.
VEX summer camps — Ran them for middle schoolers and raised the team's yearly budget, so cost wasn't what kept anyone off it.
VEX Massachusetts State Champions, 2026 · USACO Silver · PicoCTF 2023–2025
For fun: Long-distance biking, hiking the White Mountains, and currently Sichuan and Mexican cooking.