It started with a PNG of the moves.

In December 2012 I saved a file called Moves.png — a picture of the notation, because I kept forgetting which way R' went. That file still exists. It's the oldest thing in a Google Drive folder I've never renamed from “Rubik's Old Stuff”.

Once I could solve it, people asked me to teach them. So I made a deck. Then a better deck. Then a PDF, because not everyone could open a .ppt. I'd sit next to someone, hand them a cube, and walk them through it — cross, corners, middle layer, last layer — and then send them the file so they had something to go back to when they inevitably got stuck on step four.

I've taught at least 60 people to solve a Rubik’s Cube that way. One at a time, from a slide deck, over more than a decade.

In 2016 my friend Rishi and I tried to make it bigger. We built Oricube on one of those drag-and-drop website builders, back before I knew how to write a line of code — his half was origami, mine was the cube. We got about as far as writing up how to solve the first layer before we both got lazy and let it die quietly. I've looked for it since; it's gone, and I'm fairly sure we never finished it anyway.

I compete, too — 8 WCA competitions since 2017, from Tamil Nadu to Illinois. I have never won a medal, and I go anyway. I'm not fast enough to podium and I've made peace with that; a competition is a reason to travel, and a room where everyone cares about the same strange thing. Turning up is the whole point. The full record is here, medals column and all.

It took two more years — and an interest in coding that finally clicked near the end of 12th grade in 2018 — before I could build the thing Oricube was trying to be. CuberVerse is that deck, and that abandoned website, finally built properly. Every algorithm is drawn as the case it actually solves and plays back on a 3D cube, so nobody has to squint at a diagram and guess. It's the thing I wish I could have sent people in 2012.