Alina Abidi is a software engineer from California. She casually solved crosswords for years, then quickly descended into superfandom: doing the next day’s NYT puzzle right when the clock struck 7:00 PM, reading daily blogs, watching videos of speed solvers, politely arguing in forums about minutiae, until finally the only thing left to do was start constructing. Now she feels silly about ever complaining that constructors overuse EWE and EPEE. This is her first accepted puzzle, but she has a note on her phone with dozens of half-baked ideas, so hopefully those will turn into more.