The author details a month-long effort to solve the Jane Street Reverse Engineering Challenge, which involves analyzing a GDS file describing an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) to determine its function. Starting with the warmup puzzle containing 27 cells, the author used the Python library gdstk to parse the files, identifying familiar signals like clk (clock), rst (reset), VGND, and VPWR, along with sky130_fd_sc_hd__ prefixed logic elements. A vcd file revealed ASCII output reading "TRY AGAIN" via a small C program.

The project spiraled into building a custom circuit simulator using sqlite3, a hardware description language parser, a testing harness, and a raylib-based GDS viewer. The author acknowledges excessive tangents and sleep deprivation, promising future posts covering specific technical steps. Code is available on the author's GitHub page.