Ocient

The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ocient or any other person or organization that is or may be related to or working with Ocient.

Named one of the top startups to watch out for in Chicago by Built in Chicago, Ocient's mission is to build the world's fastest database, ingressing billions of rows per second and having the scalability to query not just terabytes, but petabytes and even exabytes worth of data in a timely fashion. For more information on this startup that I am proud to be a part of, visit ocient.com.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois has taught me to keep an open mind and to never stop working. Studying Computer Science in the College of Engineering, I am pushed to challenge myself every single day. Whether it is being a co-founder for an investment group on campus or making time to play tennis with friends, I am always trying to keep myself busy every single day. Illinois showed me that learning is not just done in the classroom, as my experiences at school shaped me to be the person I am today.

Whether it is myself trying to figure out a new language or framework, my great friends sharing their experiences with me, or learning from one of my many fine professors, I am always absorbing new information to grow as a person and a professional.

Echelon Consulting

Echelon Consulting is a small software shop that specializes in building and supporting full lifecycle applications for its clients.

Echelon helped me gain an inside look on how a small software firm operates, and showed me just what it takes to be a successful founder of a company. Being put on two projects throughout my summer at Echelon, I had to learn to balance two completely different applications and make the necessary changes when called upon. Learning to manage my time wisely and learn new technology stacks in the process, my time here definitely increased my software skills and hunger to learn more.

Tech used: Java Spring MVC, Oracle SQL, Apache SOLR search, Dojo.js, HTML, Less

Pivotal Labs

Pivotal Labs is a programming consulting company that teaches clients how to program in an agile software development cycle.

This internship really opened my mind to the importance of following the right practices when it comes to software development. Being brand new to both pair programming and test driven development, Pivotal Labs showed me just how useful and powerful developers can be when well organized. Through the continuous delivery of our application and weekly scrum meetings, I gained invaluable experience coding with some of the best developers in the business.

Below is an article that Pivotal Labs wrote about my time there.

Tech used: React.js, Redux.js, Node.js, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Java Spring, HTML, Less

Citadel LLC

Citadel is a hedge fund and a leading investor in financial markets around the world. The sector that I worked in, Citadel Technology, was a business that marketed and sold their trading application to other companies.

Citadel was my first time seeing how software development worked in the work place. During my time I helped automate software environment checks, optimized existing scripts, and even created my own program to stress test their financial software. Citadel showed me how to keep your nose to the grind stone to get the job done, and that the best way to learn coding is through simply playing around with unfamiliar technologies. Being able to see the simple intricacies and interesting problems being solved every single day at Citadel, this internship confirmed my choice in picking the right profession.

Tech used: Python, matplotlib, shell scripting, FIX protocol

Dubs App

During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to teach ourselves Flutter. We were frequently playing video games together online, so thought it would be a fun idea to create a messenger app for us and our close friends. Using the Flutter BLoC pattern, we created a functional messenger app that uses Google Firebase as the backend.

Tech used: Flutter, Dart, Google Firebase

Raspberry Pi Google Calendar TV Alarm

Having a busy schedule at school and struggling to wake up most mornings, I created a television alarm with a raspberry pi computer to help me be better organized. Using the google calendar api, I integrated my schedule to turn on my bedroom TV an hour before my first event was scheduled for the day. The TV would display my application, which showed the weather for the week, time, a couple news articles, and my schedule using various apis I found online. It prompted me to wake up with a basic text to speech module, and gave me time to see what I had going on for the day before it shut itself down. This was a really fun experience working with a raspberry pi for my first time, as I still use this program every single day.

Tech used: Python, Raspberry Pi, cec-client, Google Calendar api, Cron, HTML, CSS

Personal Website and Photo Album

Originally just used to teach myself HTML and CSS for my internship at Pivotal Labs, my personal website was just supposed to be a teaching project that would never be published. This changed however, as I was tasked with building a website for my programming studio class. I decied to teach myself the Django web framework, where I was able to store all of my data in a database, rendering different components dynamically with HTML templates. I built my own comment section, a photo album with google maps, and even a blog page. This whole process opened my mind to exploring new technology options, and taught me that no language or application is too hard for me to learn. The current web page you see today is an adaptation of this old project, as this page is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript all written by me hosted on GitHub Pages.

Tech used: Django framework, Python, Ajax, JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Fantasy Sports Lineup Generator

Being an avid football fan and sports fan in general, I decided to create a script to generate lineups for daily fantasy sports. In daily fantasy sports, you create a lineup of players that you believe will do well, all while staying under a fixed budget. This is a classic knapsack problem in CS, as each player is given a weight. Using BeautifulSoup to scrape multiple sports websites, I compiled a list of statistics for each player over the past couple weeks. Taking these stats as well as using my own judgement, I was able to project how each player will do for that given day. I then was able to run these projections through an AI algorithm found online, generating 5 optimal lineups. This program ended up doing quite well versus the average player, as it had a 65% success rate in the 50/50 contests.

Tech used: Python, BeautifulSoup, Genetic Algorithm