Coding

How I got interested

My first coding experience occurred when I was around 5 years old, using the LEGO Education kit. I continued that with my dad's old Robotics Invention System, and I immediately got hooked on the idea that I could make a robot and code it using my favorite toy, LEGO. On my 10th birthday, I got a LEGO Mindstorm EV3 and built all sorts of robots, including a snake, a scorpion, and a Rubik's Cube-solving robot.

How I started coding

My first instance of a coding language can be traced back to Scratch in the 1st grade or in the 2nd grade. I started coding with Python in the 5th grade, with my first program being a Space Invader clone. I then got into the idea of creating Minecraft mods, but I really only created cheats for game modes, such as trying to figure out how to overload a chunk to duplicate items. I created a few basic projects but never published them to GitHub, and they are lost to an old SSD in a random drawer.

I started seriously learning and coding with Java in high school during my AP Computer Science Principles class, and I found that I had a skill that nobody else had, as I would oftentimes send my code between students and even helped the AP Computer Science A students. My first GitHub repository was made in my sophomore year of high school, and looking back, I had awful code structure and logic, but I was proud of it at the time. The program was written in Python and allowed the user to input a subject, and the program would scrape the web for emails to which the user could send a pre-made message to each company.

In my junior year, I forked a TikTok bot that took advantage of a website to automate the liking of a video. I helped keep the repository alive, but the original creator did not like how I fixed his code, so my fork was never merged. I also tried to learn machine learning and am still trying to understand complex concepts. I currently work with TensorFlow and have a few repositories on my GitHub that I am proud of.

I started entering hackathons in my senior year, with my first being AIFAHacks, where I won the top award for my project, PaveGuard, where we used machine learning YOLO models to analyze road fractures to provide data for city councils to create a crowd-sourced map of road conditions.

My next hackathon was HackUTD, where we won the Kintone challenge with our project HomeReady Pro. We initially wanted to use a machine learning model to analyze the data for loan eligibility using binary cross-entropy, but we found out that the data was not that consistent, so we decided to integrate the ChatGPT API to analyze room for improvement when applying for a loan.

Outside of hackathons, I participated in the computer science UIL, in which I did mediocre at best, and VEX Robotics, where I was a side coder, and I learned how to code in C++.

My current projects

I am in college (Northeastern University) and studying computer science. In my freshman year, we initially learned Kotlin, but in my sophomore year, we switched to Java. The classes are relatively easy; however, the teachers have a genuine passion for their work, so I am glad to learn under their wing. I have learned a few more languages and tools over my time in high school and college, such as JavaScript, ReactJS, NextJS, PostgreSQL, and Git. I enjoy hosting on Heroku as I hope to learn more about Salesforce.