And I’m an 21-year-old who loves to code.
I’ve been interested in technology since 2009 and writing software since 2016. It’s been my hobby that turned into my professional career.
Back in the early 2010s, general technology was my jam. I was introduced during the era where the first iPad came out (and I had it!). I was super interested in technology of any kind. Every day after I got home from school, I would check YouTube on the latest tech updates.
Things got off the ground in 2013 - I was part of the Code Springers Club at a local library, where a few guys and myself (all in middle school at this point) would be IT admins. This was my playground, and did such things as set up 6 old towers in their networking room for clustered local Minecraft hosting…which overheated the room and brought down the network at the library. Twice. I stuck around there for the better part of 7 years, until the club stopped running when COVID hit.
Back in that day, I also hosted the SurvivalCraft-MC Network, my “professionally run” Minecraft server that ran for 3 years. This server taught me a lot about Linux server administration, basic networking, and of course how to set up lots of Spigot plugins. I was also running a Weebly site and Enjin forum as well alongside the server. It was basically my life - until I had to shut it down in 2016 from getting doxxed after engaging in flame wars on the internet because there was another server called the SurvivalCraft Network (my parents weren’t exactly pleased). Not my proudest moment.
At around the same time, I was attending tech camps at iD Tech every summer. I was learning some cool stuff like Java modding for Minecraft, Java in general, Unity games in C++, but none of it stuck after camp. But it all changed in the summer of 2016, taking a Python course and for the first time really understanding and wanting to do software engineering.
After a bit of a hiatus, I started doing Python development more regularly in November 2016. I fired back up development of PyTerm, a very interesting tool that had nothing useful in it from what I can recall. I moved over to the PyWeather project in 2017, a tool intended to let you check the weather in the terminal which snowballed into a massive open-source project that I fully maintained for 2 years, until the Wunderground API that I was using shut down.
PyWeather went pretty hard - so hard it included GUI functionality, 50 config options, automatic updating, it was intense stuff to be doing at a young age. The codebase was also a single file that was 10,000 lines long. Early days. But my software engineering passion had been ignited.
In summer 2018, I got my first summer internship at a start-up led by a dad who I knew from Code Springers. My task there was to develop a tool to help automate their QA processes, and also make a web portal to show results. This was my first time doing anything on the web (aside from some basic Codecademy stuff), and could be considered my first “full-stack system” (in quotes, the page was locally hosted).
I was also commuting to New York City four days a week as a 16 year old. The janitors in the WeWork office were very confused what I was doing there.
In January 2019, I started track.easterbunny.cc, my first major webdev project. I taught myself more HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and APIs like the Google Maps JS API to make the Easter Bunny Tracker I would’ve wanted as a kid, with a moving map, live updates, and all that good stuff. It ended up getting about 4,000 hits the first year thanks to advertising it via my (small) YouTube page.
Ultimately, track.easterbunny.cc ballooned into a massive project, spanning 6 versions before shutting it down in 2024. The project increased in scope & size massively, becoming the most full-featured trackers to exist on the internet (at the expense of zero graphic design, as that is not what I am) just to challenge myself even more. It managed to go through a (mostly successful aside from CDN configuration issues) React refactor in 2023. Every Easter from 2021, it got over 100,000 hits. Crazy stuff.
Going back to 2019 - it was at this time I built my first Flask API in Python. Back in high school at the time, I ran a Snow Day Predictor with a website, but thought it would be super cool if I could send out texts to everyones phones whenever I made a new prediction.
That spurred the Snow Day SMS Service, which was a really cool API that allowed students to sign their phone up through the predictor website and get texts whenever I made a new prediction. About a fourth of the high school used this service, and I ran it for two seasons before I graduated in 2020.
My first truly full-stack project came in the form of CenHud Outage Trends v2 in Summer 2019, a simple website to track 72 hours of outage statistics for my local utility company, Central Hudson. Version 2 of the site was developed with Flask for the backend, and Jinja for the frontend to do server-side rendering. It was also at this time that I had another summer at the place I interned in 2018, further developing the QA tool I had made the summer before.
I went to college at Worcester Polytechnic Institute - starting in fall 2020. Within 2 days of starting, I found a loophole in the APIs they were using for dining reservations for COVID, allowing it to bypass any capacity restrictions. I then made DOCBatch to wrap these APIs. DOCBatch 3 came out in early 2021 with a much better UI (and still remains some of my best UI work to date). The end goal was to make the UX of making a dining reservation pretty seamless compared to the app. It even included innovations such as reserve for now, eat now (selecting the closest dining location based on where you are, then reserving for now), and Siri shortcuts?! But alas, the dining reservation system was nixed for the 2021-2022 school year, and DOCBatch went with it.
While all that was going on, I embarked on a new project called PyWeather 2, which was my first hardware + software project. I combined a Raspberry Pi and a Pimoroni e-ink display, plus some sensors to see what the weather was outside, all without having to look at my phone. PyWeather 3 introduced an upgrade with a larger display + more sensors, and continues to live on today in my apartment.
This project introduced How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room, which was a website I could look at to see, well, how hot it was in my dorm room, plus 3 days of historical data. The project continues to live on today even in my apartment and holds the crown for the only project that’s required a true-to-word hot fix (the temp got too high and broke an easter egg).
At the end of freshman year, as I stared outside the window watching the snow, I was like, “damn, I want something that can capture the weather and turn it into a timelapse”. I had a perfect excuse in the form of the Pimoroni OctoCam hardware kit - buying it at 4 AM and kicking off development of the OctoCam project that’s been running since March 2021.
OctoCam remains one of my most memorable projects. It’s captured rainbows, snowstorms, rainstorms, and everything in between - all seamlessly and effortlessly for years on end. Between hardware & camera upgrades throughout the years, it’s captured well over 4 million images.
From 2021 to mid 2023, I was getting pretty busy with school and didn’t have time to start up a lot of new personal projects. During this time, I was largely improving what I already had.
OctoCam continued development and gained lots of new features - eventually landing on the current frontend that largely finished development in late 2022.
track.easterbunny.cc continued the trend of yearly upgrades, with v5 in 2021 and v5.6 in 2022. During this time, I also threw up some GitLab CI infrastructure to centrally manage an ever growing number of projects.
Over the summer of 2022, I finally had my first in-person internship at SimpliSafe after 3 years due to COVID. I was (and continue to) spearhead a new SDET team, developing internal tools for other teams to test their code with, largely in Python.
Over summer 2022, I fired up a new project, SkyCast, which was my introduction to React and generally much better coding styles. While a small project, it was super influential to the remainder of my web development career. This led to the React refactor of track.easterbunny.cc over early 2023, which introduced a new UI framework to the tracker and cleaned up the codebase massively.
I interned at SimpliSafe again in the summer of 2023 (and stayed part-time over the school year). With a larger SDET team, I was really learning a lot more about good code styles & practices and how to code much more professionally.
In late 2023, I fired up a new major project for the first time in 2 years - Lesburu Analytics. The premise was to automatically track my drives in my car, independent of any phone/hotspot/whatever, see this data on a frontend, and also do live location tracking.
It was a major project with a lot of hurdles to solve - but armed with 7 years of coding experience and a much older and wiser brain, I made it happen. Readable & maintainable code, a reliable design, and honestly a really awesome end product - it’s the best representation of how far I’ve grown since starting to code in 2016.
And that’s a bit about me! I love coding & technology and making all sorts of really fun projects as solutions to silly problems I think of, and I can’t wait for things to progress even more in the future.
I’ll be graduating WPI in May 2024 with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. It’s the culmination of almost 15 years of finding my passion and growing up as an autistic person with Aspergers + ADHD and all the challenges that come with it. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.