About Me
I'm a passionate programmer who loves compilers, programming languages, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, interface design, tools for learning, and learnable tools. Away from computing, you can find me outside in the woods, playing soccer, riding a mountain bike, or oil painting at an easel.
For a more professional-focused summary, I'd invite you to visit my LinkedIn profile or resume.
I recently graduated from Tufts University and currently live in Philadelphia. Although I studied computer science, I was planning on majoring in cultural anthropology, until at the last minute I fell in love with programming during an introductory course (see my first programs). I learn mostly by building things for myself, and you can see some of this progression in my projects section. I'm quite proud of how far I've come.
I spent the last two summers working on three projects at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The projects included a prototype and GUI interface to create data schemas for the Neurodata Without Borders standard, a tool to browse performance history of bioinformatics workflows on the NERSC supercomputers as an attempt to solve unnecessary resource requests, and a bespoke algorithm to filter semantically meaningless technical words in large groups of scientific papers for the Joint Genome Institute.
I still care about cultural anthropology and I'm particularly interested in the relationship between American society and technology. Although, now I want to be in the exciting position to design and construct technology rather than analyzing it from the outside. I was excited to learn that some of my heroes, e.g. Alan Kay, share this interest.
Some cool things I've done
Before programming I wanted to try being an artist, so during COVID I took a semester off of school and moved alone to Taos, New Mexico to try pursue painting full-time. It was fun, and I managed to show my art in a gallery. Eventually, I realized that I want to spend my time working more collaboratively, than just painting on my own. Check out my art page to see some of my works. Funnily enough, the process of programming is very similar to painting for me.
In college I designed and taught a semester-long full-credit freshman seminar course with my friend Max. The class was called "Conspiracy Theories and the Epistemology of Belief". It used conspiracy theories as a lens question how social narratives shape the way we believe, not just what we believe. Using these analyses, we reflected on how we can all carefully evaluate the biases that shape each of our own ideologies.