One of my first ever projects, and likely the place where I first fell in love with entrepreneurship and software development as a whole. This was during my first semester of undergrad, and I had recently learned React independently to prepare for building this. It took the team and I nearly the full 24 hours to finish. We kept having issues with Electron that kept us from completing the project. But we finished... and then we won. As a wide-eyed freshman, winning a competitive hackathon full of so much talent and experience was surreal. I will never forget receiving the announcement in the elevator with the team - ggs only!

I almost excluded this project, but it changed my life and undergrad experience enough that it needs at least an inclusion. Early in my 2nd semester of undergrad, a friend and teammate from earlier showed me this bot he was using to buy NFTs quickly after release. This was a big deal because many of these releases were first come, first serve, with several captchas and gates to prevent botting. This would cause the price of the NFTs to skyrockets right after release, then plummet each day after. You can think of the old NFT market price graph like a Dunning-Kruger curve. At the time, he had only been using the bot for a couple turns - so I was immediately excited about increasing the use of this literal money printing bot. I ended up getting into Cardano, updating the GUI for the software, and bot > upselling as many NFTs as we could. The NFT bubble popped shortly after, and we were only able to profit on this for a few months. But the profits we did make allowed me to pay off my sophomore year of undergrad, all thanks to an exploitation of a broken market.

After the previous year's hackathon, the team and I wanted to secure the fabled 'twopeat' and win a second year in a row. However, we knew that we would need a novel solution to a real problem to achieve that. At the time, AI was just barely entering the mainstream, and we thought it would be a cool technology to solve a problem with. This was mere weeks before the release of Chat-GPT, and we decided to use GPT-3 only because of issues with Google's Sentiment Analysis. I remember how cool we thought GPT-3 was and what Brevity was capable of. And admittedly, it was for the time. But writing this today, it's clear that this was only the beginning. Even though we got 2nd, this was my favorite hackathon I competed in - our first glimpse into the future and the world to come.

Smash has been such a large part of my life, and my time running tournaments and supporting our scene has been a highlight of my personal projects. While not a 'technical' project like the others on here, I consider my work for UNC smash to be one of the most personally relevant projects I've worked on. Leading a club, running tournaments, and competing all at once can be exhausting. But it is also incredibly rewarding! I've had the opportunity to become a better leader, competitor, and friend through my years in the scene. There is no greater joy for me than bringing people together to play the game I love!

[Coming Soon!]

This is the latest personal project that I've grown attached to! For the last year and a half, I've played at a home game we host in Chapel Hill. We're all super into poker and stats, so we've been recording each night since the beginning. Earlier this summer, I was inspired to build out an actual, deployed site we can reference instead of littered excel sheets. This was why I created the 'UNC Poker Tracker', a smarter stats tracker using our spreadsheet data as the source of truth. Now, it's grown to become something much larger. It has all kinds of stats, player insights, etc. I'm planning on adding an actual database and support for multiple leagues next, among other changes. Nothing too crazy but it's been a blast to work on!