Right now, I'm a software engineer working with Toyota at Infosys. I'm also a recent computer science graduate from Texas A&M. I love building new projects with a purpose to innovate and impact so if you have any suggestions, ideas, or questions, I'd love to hear from you!
I'm constantly looking for new ways to improve myself, so if you want to work on something together, please reach out. If you have an opportunity available, I'd love to hear about it. I'm a results-driven, hard-working, and determined software engineer and if my background and mindset matches what you're looking for, don't hesitate to reach out here or on Linkedin. I have experience with Python (Django and Flask), Java (Spring Framework), JS (React, Angular), HTML, CSS, C++, MySQL, and Git.
What in the heck is Project Partner Finder? That sounds very silly, I bet, huh? In fact, I'm trying to solve a problem that I faced with this very project.
First off, have you ever been to a hackathon? If you haven't, you're seriously missing out! Anyways, it's essentially an event where "hackers" come together to work on something interesting and important to them in a span of a weekend! Yes, this means that some people stay up for 24 hours (sometimes even longer) to work on this (though that's not recommended), but it's definitely a blast. This could be anything from a building an IoT hack, a mobile app, or a website. Generally, there are sponsors that help to cater ideas to a specific use case such as healthcare or finance. The point is, you get to work on such cool projects with new technologies with new people!
Back to the project. Many hackathons are typically catered to university students. Most of the time, this means, pair up with people at your school and work on an interesting idea you may have. Although that might be a cool idea, it's not always the best for meeting new people, networking, finding the right team, etc. What Project Partner Finder is intended to do is to be able to help people going to the same event be able to team up and collaborate (this also works for just general open source project collaboration)! In the end, it's all about connecting the developer community. This project has been in the works for over a year, and I'm very excited about it. So far, you can connect with developers using a custom interface and a built-in chat. Eventually, I want to expand this project to general project collaboration, but one step at a time. If you'd like to know more about some of the technical details, please feel free to reach out!
This picture is probably very interesting to you. If you thought that it was a way to recommend movies based on your friends' activities, you were spot on! (I'm guessing you probably weren't thinking this at all).
This was actually based on a project my team and I had done during undergrad. It uses a baseline recommendation algorithm on the backend to recommend movies based on individual ratings of your friends. I've enhanced this so that you can use the Facebook SDK to be able to log you in and be able to interact with your actual friends to make it more life-like.
Something I found super interesting in this process was learning how to write the algorithm that's responsible for the recommendations. I think scaling this up from a normalized use case to a scalable one if so exciting to think about. If you're really interested in how it works, I'd recommend (ba dum-tss) you to learn more about information retrieval as well as collaborative filtering. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
Quick Look Up? Don't Macs have a thing called Quick Look? Well this has nothing to do with that, haha. This was honestly my favorite project to work on. It was for my capstone project and we essentially had to come up with a major problem that needed fixing (we could've created anything, to be honest). The problem we came up with was to optimize lost and found services, specifically, those found on campuses.
What were we trying to optimize exactly? Well, we wanted to focus our time on the time it took from the moment that someone lost their item to the moment that they were able to retrieve it. I think that this was a very interesting problem as we ran into many roadblocks in terms of security and generic environments.
Initially, we tried to think of every case that we could think of (think airports, apartment complexes, large stadiums, corporate offices) and this really slowed us down. I don't think we realized this till later on, but in solving a large complex problem, it often helps to focus on a specific use-case; this is where we pivoted to campuses only. Another issue that slowed us down was the sense of security that you feel when you know you're dealing with someone you can trust.
How exactly did we solve this problem though? We build a mobile app of course! Specifically, we built an iOS app that allowed an owner of a lost item to report their lost item on the app. Then we thought, how could we possibly optimize the time? We realized that every lost and found system has a middle man; the lost and found service, itself. By eliminating the need to go to a central office, this would allow for people to get what's theirs in record time. This is also where another brilliant idea came into play. We decided that since the middle man needed to be removed, we needed a way for both parties to communicate in a safe environment. From here, we used the Twilio API to essentially have the person who found a lost item to text a specific number to enter through a communication portal. Before the middle tier is able to connect the two through the Twilio API, we wanted to verify that the item they found is actually a lost item and that they aren't just claiming to have found a lost item to inadverdently rob someone.
Remember when the owner reported their lost item? That inserted some very necessary details into a MySQL database. For our case, we only stuck with a set of items that we knew that owners would want back: wallet, keys, and prescriptions. By encrypting all of the information and using a middle tier protective layer such as AWS, we were able to manage expectations in terms of security and convenience.
Anyways, once the person who found the lost item texted that specific number through regular SMS, they were met with a few questions that get sent from our PHP server asking for secure information that they would only know if they found the lost items. For instance, you would only know the name of the medicine and the person it belonged to if you had it physically in your hands. Once we were able to verify that they had the item, this would set up a chat through to our iOS app (did I mention that we also implemented a built-in chat)?
We essentially created an interface within a regular SMS text messaging app and only the owner of the lost item had to have the app downloaded. I thought this was very clever in terms of convenience of not having the app downloaded. It makes sense that if you really want your item back, you would download the app. The chat interface would also allow the two people to meet up somewhere on campus and exchange the lost item.
We also gave the option for the owner to signify that they retrieved their lost item and close the chat connection so that the other person can't reach them again for security purposes. All in all, I think that this was a very unique solution to a very complex problem and a succesful one at that. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any lingering questions as I'd love to answer some of them.
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Close Project
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Close Project
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Mollitia neque assumenda ipsam nihil, molestias magnam, recusandae quos quis inventore quisquam velit asperiores, vitae? Reprehenderit soluta, eos quod consequuntur itaque. Nam.
Close Project