About Myself
Hi there, I'm Benjamin, a San Francisco native and recent UCLA graduate. My primary interest is programming: I began teaching myself Python when I was younger, and I've spent my entire academic career trying to expand my repretoire.
I also studied linguistics, which is handy in the modern realm of AI and natural language processing. But also, learning about linguistic structure and writing systems provided a great balance to the STEM rigor of my CS coursework. I also took enough Mandarin to be conversationally fluent.
I spend most of my spare time cycling, weightlifting, and climbing. Not only does staying active keep me happy and focused, but I believe it's an essential balance for any software job.
What can I do?
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Python
This was my first programming language, and my go-to for personal projects
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Django
I've used this framework to create a couple of websites in my own time
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HTML/CSS/JS What this very website was built with - no website builder required 😉
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C++ Required by most of the courses I took in college
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C# Self-taught, and I pass down that knowledge as part of my tutoring job
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Databases I stick with PostgreSQL for personal projects
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Haskell I'd be surprised to use this again, but it made me really good at recursion
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Theoretical Programming Optimization algorithms, Graphs, Automata & Turing Machines, AI & Neural Networks
Personal Projects
Statistics Chatbot
My university has an active Discord server, and I created a website which collects detailed information about chatroom users: what times they’re active, who they talk most with, etc.
On the backend, all readable messages from the server are processed in batches, and relevant info is saved to a PostgreSQL database.
On the frontend, the data is neatly displayed on a webpage with help from Django's HTML templating and some Javascript.
Online CLI Chess
I wrote this multiplayer chess game in C++, designed to be run on the command-line. Using C's socket library, you can play with a friend on two different computers. The setup is contained in the Github's README.