WWDC18 Scholarship
In June 2018, I had the opportunity to attend Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. After years of watching Apple's latest announcements & developer sessions from home, I joined 5,350 other developers in San Jose, CA for those and in-person labs with Apple engineers, who not only helped with fixing a bug or suggesting design changes, but even further helped me find where I needed to go next as a young developer. As for the scholarship, I won one of 350 scholarships, which included a free ticket to the conference where only 120 other people were under 18. I earned the scholarship based on essays and a Swift Playgrounds (similar to a sandboxed application) development challenge, where I built a physics-based 2D game.
Leaning Eagle App
My school approached me to prototype, design, build, distrbute, and manage an iOS application to enable online ordering for the school's coffee bar. Through conversations with the Entrepeneurial Program Director, I designed the app alongside client's adapting specifications: what started out as an order-ahead app has flourished into new delivery options, payment solutions, and multiple business venues. The app utilizes Stripe and Apple Pay for secure credit card processing, CloudKit for database storage of orders, and Amazon Web Services's Lambda Cloud functions for encryption.
AR Directions
Back in 2017, I met a friend at Apple's Worlwide Developers Conference. He was a few years my senior, yet we became good friends. In the months following the conference, over multiple FaceTime conference calls and GitHub commits, built a prototype of an augmented reality turn-by-turn navigation app, which we (quite creatively) called ARDirections.
Through this process, my friend acted as a mentor for me. As this was the summer after my seventh grade, he introduced me to new concepts in mathematics and computer science. I quickly learned how the unit circle, a term my thirteen-year-old self had previously never heard of, could be used to map real-world latitude and longitude coordinates to the three-dimensional virtual coordinate space of an iPhone’s augmented reality world view.
Robotics ML Vision
From April 2018 through January 2019, I developed an iPhone-based computer vision solution for my FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 4028. I intended to build off my previous iOS experience with AR Directions and utilize Apple's faster SoCs and machine learning APIs (Vision, Core ML) to build an object detection mechanism faster and more accurate than any of our competitors could offer.
For networking, WiFi communications are not permitted in FRC matches; thus, we utilized Ethernet and IBM's BlueSocketNetworking API to leverage low-level TCP sockets to send discrete data packets to the robot. For computer vision, we explored OpenCV, Apple's Vision framework, and custom machine learning models with Turi Create and Core ML, before selecting Core Image color filters and Apple's Vision rectangle detection framework. This one-of-a-kind FRC vision solution has never been used on any other team to date and provided a uniquely personal solution to FRC vision tracking.
Website Development
During the summer of 2021, a software engineer mentioned that website development would be a useful tool to continue my development journey. I initially began teching myself how to build this website from raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, having no former experience and without using any templates. Along the way, I encountered an opprtunity to build a website for an investment firm in just over six weeks. I delivered, surpassing my client's expectations as I combined my experience working with a client from the Leaning Eagle App above with my newfound web development experience. For both websites, I have written every line of code myself, and for this website, all content (text and images) are designed, developed, and edited by myself. I hope to continue adding more interactive elements as my experience grows.
Investment Website
