About Me

What I like most is a hard problem. The kind with no clean answer, where the constraints fight each other and you have to find, or build, the best way through. I’m a computer science student at UC Santa Cruz, going into my third year, and that’s the thread through most of what I’ve built.

It shows up in different shapes. I built a voxel renderer from scratch around a data structure I designed that holds a scene in a fifth the space while staying fast to trace on the GPU. I worked out how to lay all 16 million RGB colors into a single image that reads as one smooth gradient, using a method I haven’t seen anyone else use. I tuned a production service until it ran 39% faster and cost 92% less for the same output. And I built a robot that fuses its sensors to know where it is on the field to within a centimeter.

Let me be straight about speed, since it’s the thing people assume about me. I do love making things fast. It’s a big part of why I learned Rust. But the fast I care about is fast without cutting corners. It’s easy to make something quick by making it worse. The version I want is both at once, and that’s the harder problem.

What I’m looking for

A software engineering internship, and I’m casting a wide net on purpose. Not just graphics. I’d be glad to spend a summer on backend, infrastructure, performance, embedded, or rendering, anywhere the problem is hard and I get to ship something real next to engineers I can learn from.

I’m two years in with a couple more to go, and I’m using them to work out which kind of hard problem I want to go deepest on. I lean a certain way already. I’d rather test that against a few real ones than bet everything on a single lane this early.

How I work

The thing I’m proudest of from the last two years wasn’t a feature. On a game built by a 100-person student team, I got convinced our rendering setup was going to rot into something we couldn’t dig out of. Rather than keep arguing about it in meetings, I rebuilt a full level on a new 3D system to prove the point, and that prototype is what got the team to switch. The transparency shader I wrote afterward was much harder code. Convincing people to do the rewrite was the part that mattered.

I also care about making things other people can pick up, so I write stuff down. My robotics team has a wiki I built from scratch so the hard parts survive after I graduate, and every project on this site has a real writeup. Being able to explain what you built matters about as much as building it.

Two internships inside production codebases taught me the thing I still think about most: careful beats clever when a lot of people depend on your code. I test it, I push it through review, and I’d rather ship safely than look clever and break prod.

Where graphics fits

I’ve loved video games my whole life, and graphics is where that runs into the hard-problem stuff. It’s one of the few places low-level work shows up right on the screen, so when you get it right you get to watch it run instead of reading it off a graph. That’s why ray-vox, my voxel renderer, is the project I’ve sunk the most into lately.

I don’t want to overstate it though. Graphics is one place this shows up, and it happens to be a really good one.

Outside of that

I like being close to hardware. I built my PC years ago and keep tuning it, and lately I’ve been into small form factor builds, trying to fit real performance into a roughly 10-liter case. I also fell down the audio rabbit hole: EQ, calibration, measuring how speakers and headphones actually perform. I keep meaning to write my own AutoEQ-style tool and haven’t started. I’m in UCSC’s Game Design and Art club making things in Godot. And Rust is my default when I want speed and safety at once.

Timeline

High school (2020 to 2024). Graduated from Khan Lab School. Dual-enrolled at Foothill College, taking college-level chemistry, biology, and three physics courses alongside high school. Built a CS foundation through AP CS A, robotics (FRC #6962), and a lot of independent projects. Programming lead for the robotics team, focused on control systems, simulation, and software reliability.

Summer 2022, SWE Intern at SmugMug. Full-time paid internship after my sophomore year of high school, working in a real production codebase in PHP, React, and Next.

Summer 2023, SWE Intern at Flickr. Internship after my junior year, tuning a production AWS pipeline to cut its compute cost about 92% and run 39% faster.

University (2024 to now). Computer science at UC Santa Cruz, going into my third year. Building systems-level projects across graphics, data, and infrastructure, and looking for a software engineering internship while I work out where to focus.