shayna is a pisces. and a senior studying computer science at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign. she likes cs, chess, and writing about cs and chess in a human-driven way. her mission is to empower people, enrich lives, and enhance communities through her work as a techno-optimist.

logic problem: a puzzle in which the answer can be deduced from a given set of premises. a software engineer by trade, shayna has always liked documenting and solving logic problems. specifically, she is interested in the human and social impact of the logic problems she solves. as a computer science student, some of her coursework includes data structures and algorithms, ethical and professional issues, technology and advertising campaigns, and user interface design. previously, she has interned for amazon, working for aws cryptography as well as supply chain optimization technologies. most recently, she was tasked with capturing/recording suppression status updates and allowing customers to query historical suppression updates. outside of work, she was also founder and president of built by girls at uiuc, a chapter of the national organization dedicated to preparing female leaders for careers in technology. she is currently it chair for filipino-americans coming together (fact), a conference that brings together over 1000 filipino-americans from the midwest and around the country.

having played chess since she was 10, shayna has come to call the chess world home. playing competitively on a national level even as a kid, some of her achievements include taking part in the susan polgar foundation girls' invitational, winning the illinois state girls open championship, and consistently placing in the top girls for her age both in illinois as well as the us. in high school, she continued to rank among the top girls nationally, achieved a class a uscf rating, and won the illinois high school association team chess state championship twice. currently a college student, shayna plays for her school's chess team but is now focused on content creation for the game that has been such a big part of her life. specifically, she is looking to explore the squishy side of chess, the parts that can't be analyzed by a computer. she likes to consider the aspects of chess that make it a soft science, its culture and history, and what it means for humans to still be playing this silly little game.

shayna is a firm believer that any time spent working on the things that we love is time well spent. as a result, she would like to share the projects that are important to her, but don't necessarily fit into the previous categories. genshin impact is a video game whose lore has been a huge inspiration for many of shayna's creative ventures. as staff, she is currently growing a genshin impact lore community with 14.5k+ followers on twitter and 4k+ members on discord. in addition she is a subreddit mod for r/Ganyu, a fan community dedicated to one of the characters with 30k+ members. finally, writing has always been a passion of shayna's. and she has written. a lot.