everything ever

(almost) everything notable I've ever done.

last updated Apr 23rd, 2025

Current

Mountain Biking (2014 - Present)

I started mountain biking before most kids rode a school bus. I had my first race at 6 years old, going on to join a regional mountain bike team in 6th grade and continued racing with this team until 9th grade when I turned my attention to assisting in developing a new team in my local area. I still ride on a weekly basis, working on skills and fitness, and I continue to race in unique events when my schedule is free. My last race was the Paranormal 6 hour, starting at 16:00 and ending at 22:30) where my team tied for second, and my second to last race was the PocaGo enduro outside of Richmond, VA where I placed 4th.

Team Riding (2019 - Present)

As mentioned in the section above, I started riding and racing on a NICA team when I was in 6th grade, and my father and I started our own team when I was in 9th grade in our area. This team initially split due to disagreements between coaches and bullying between some of the student athletes, but we’re now bigger than we ever were before, with almost 40 attendees at the majority of our practices. At said practices, I lead rides 95% of the time, develop my skills and fitness, and practice social skills on the trail. I also occasionally work with our younger riders in order to help our coaches to develop our next generation of riders.

LeetCode (2023 - Present)

After I finished my Stanford course on algorithms (see miscellaneous achievements), I had enough confidence to start working away at LeetCode problems – which, if you’re unfamiliar, are algorithm based problems in an interview format). LeetCode problems tend to be extremely difficult because it’s extremely hard to find help, and when you don’t understand a problem, it’s generally up to you to figure out what you don’t understand and how to solve it. Additionally, there are occasionally multiple correct solutions. In total, I’ve solved about 160 problems.

LeetCode Contests (2023 - Present)

Once I got my confidence up (see LeetCode), I tried out a few live LeetCode contests (4 in total). I’d love to participate in some more in the future, but as I’ve previously mentioned, LeetCode takes up a lot of time, and preparing for these contests is even more time consuming. Each contest took place on Saturday night, and every contest had 4 problems – 1 easy problem, 2 medium problems, and 1 hard problem.

Dev.to Moderator (2023 - Present)

As a moderator on Dev.to, I log on to Dev.to every day, scroll through my feed, find a post to leave a positive & encouraging comment on, and look for any hateful, spammy, or AI generated posts. After that, I log on to the Dev.to moderator discord, check in on any discussions, and reply to anything that needs to be replied to. I semi-regularly discuss the best way to deal with spammers, and do my best to apply what I hear and learn from the Dev.to moderator discord to the Dev.to community.

Blogging on Dev.to (2023 - Present)

I write monthly (ish) blogs on Dev.to, from anything to “state of the community” style posts to technical writing such as writing a post about how I implemented React and Django with Docker (two frameworks that are notoriously tricky to implement, check out the project here). As of April 2025, I have 14 thousand followers, and 40 thousand post views.

Neovim (2023 - Present)

I picked up an extremely extensible and extremely barebones editor called Neovim in late 2023. I spent a good deal of time learning its paradigms and motions (literally, they’re called Vim motions). Then I wrote my own configuration for the editor in the Lua programming language and installed and configured ~49 plugins. I love it to death and still use it to this day (and I never plan to switch to anything else). Additionally, I recently (December 2024) began to use Neovim for note taking, and I produced a video and blog post about said setup that gathered lots of attention. You can read more about that in this section. P.S: The reason this is in the “Current” section is because I spend a decent bit of time maintaining the configuration files when updates to plugins inevitably break something.

Dotfiles for Arch Linux (2024 - Present)

When I started programming many moons ago, I daily drove Windows. This quickly became a hamper on my productivity however, so I started to dual boot to Ubuntu. However, Ubuntu is a pain to modify (ppa’s, apt, gdm, gnome), so I chose to boot to Arch Linux. I configured my own desktop environment from scratch using i3 as a window manager and picom as my compositor (also stuff like dunst, rofi, and kitty). As with Neovim, this is listed in “Current” because I’m almost constantly messing with my configuration.

byeAI (August 18th 2024 - Present)

I created a blogging site for developers that solves the biggest problem modern blogging sites have: an influx of AI generated content. I developed a single page application (SPA) with React, TanStack Query, Redux, and React Router Dom, and integrated frontend testing with Vitest. I also deployed the application on a virtual private server (VPS), implemented Nginx as well as tools for developer operations, and configured Linux to manage continuous integration on the server side. On the less technical side of things, I also marketed the website on multiple social platforms. I created both short-form and full length videos involving the promotion of the website, as well as writing articles with the intention of advertising byeAI. I also utilized Google Analytics to track and monitor the site’s performance.

Coding Youtube Series (September 18th 2024 - Present)

I created and uploaded 35+ YouTube “coding vlog” style videos over the course of multiple months (and hence the title, I still upload occasionally today). I accumulated about 3000 views and 80 subscribers from this endeavor. I also turned this into a blog post on Dev.to titled “I recorded myself coding for 45 days”. When I was recording, I was primarily working on byeAI.

Private tutoring (Oct 4th 2024 - Present)

Before I started tutoring for my local highschool (see this section), I started tutoring online on the small platform Tutorpeers. So far, I’ve had about 10 sessions with students, both paid and free. I have confidently and successfully tutored a 3rd year college level Computer Science student in the SDLC (software development lifecycle) & received multiple 5 star ratings. I’ve also spent a great deal of time working with a local student in preparation for the two upcoming SAT tests (Spring/Summer of 2025). I worked with them once per week, and I curated & collected problems for them nearly daily to ensure an optimal and efficient learning experience for the student.

Highschool tutoring (October 24th 2024 - Present)

When I was taking AP tests, I spent the extra time I had before and after the tests tutoring students in pre-Algebra/Algebra. I sorely enjoyed the experience, and I learned a lot about both how to teach someone and what it meant to teach someone. Then, when I visited my local highschool for an informational meeting about financial aid in September, I ended up discussing the possibility of volunteering as a student tutor weekly for Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Trigonometry, and Precalculus. This possibility turned into a reality, and I spent the next 6 months visiting my high school weekly to work 1-on-1 with students that are struggling with the previously mentioned subjects. I usually worked with two other adult volunteers that attend, as well as the Algebra I/Algebra II teacher that holds the sessions. Additionally, I practiced highschool level mathematics (specifically in the mentioned subjects) every day to ensure that I can give students the best help possible.

Youtube Content Creation (December 2024 - Present)

As I graduated from making “Late Night Coding” style-videos (seethis section), I began to make much more professional and edited videos. The first video in this style (which took about 3 weeks to produce) amassed me about 25 thousand views in a month, as well as 1 thousand hours of watch time and 250 subscribers. The second video (which again took about 3 weeks to produce) amassed me almost 60 thousand views in 3 days, as well as 3 thousand hours of watch time and 1 thousand subscribers. With that, I was eligible to start monetizing my videos and profiting off of them. I intend to keep pursuing Youtube as a potential temporary source of income.

Past (chronological order)

4H Dog Training (2017-2018)

I trained my dog, Scarlett, to perform agility at the Virginia State Fair. I spent about a year preparing her for this, however when we arrived, she decided that she didn’t want to perform that day. Nevertheless, I kept my composure and kept trying, and I was eventually able to get her to perform on about a third of the obstacles that she was intended to. This was a very valuable learning experience for me, as it was certainly a test of patience. Additionally, I won first place for my Junior Record Book – a graded scrapbook full of information about Scarlett.

CS50 (Spring of 2023)

When I became deeply interested in Computer Science (CS), I wanted to find a starting point that I could work off of. I found CS50, a free online course hosted by Harvard. CS50 is a free self paced college level course about thinking algorithmically and efficiently solving problems. It’s where I got my first experience with the C programming language.

Algorithms: Design and Analysis (May 2023 - July 2023)

After CS50, I became deeply invested in algorithms. I found a college level course hosted by Stanford that went into the more technical side of algorithms (i.e. Big O notation, a deep look into time complexity, etc). It cost $75, and it was absolutely worth it. This course helped me build the confidence to take on some more challenging LeetCode problems. You can check out the certificate I got here.

Food Pantry Volunteer (Summer of 2023)

I volunteered at my local food pantry for 4-5 hours almost every week over the summer of 2023. I improved my social skills and got to meet a lot of awesome people. I normally worked in the canned aisle, and my responsibility was to make sure that people didn’t take too many cans (although I always gave people extra, as we always had plenty and there was almost no one that ever tried to take an absurd amount of canned goods).

Personal Website (July 2023 - August 2023)

I created my own personal website with Django and hosted it on PythonAnywhere. I spent a lot of time learning about and designing the UI/UX, as well as learning a new technology: Figma.

Non-Profit Link (April 2023 - March 2024)

I created a web app to help nonprofits share their resources (you can read more about it here). I made it open source and worked to advertise the project on multiple platforms, and I was able to get 6 people to contribute to the project (this is where I met the partner that I mentioned in the hackathon; see: Hackathon). I learned a lot about Git, Django, Figma, teamwork and collaboration, and developer operations such as managing a virtual private server and multiple domains. This software is currently being used by dog shelters in South Africa.

React/Django implementation (June 2024 - July 2024)

I wanted to make a web app that could integrate React and Django together, because I wanted more customization in my development experience, and Django alone wasn’t cutting it. I dockerized both applications and used a reverse proxy/web server called Nginx to connect the two services, and I implemented authentication and page routing. I then wrote a blog post on Dev.to detailing the project and how it could be used as a template.

Hackathon (July 14, 2024 - July 19, 2024)

I took part in a virtual hackathon with a partner that I met while creating open source software (see: Non-Profit Link). Having a partner was great for brainstorming, and it gave me an opportunity to practice communication and collaboration skills. Additionally, I learned a bit of German in order to better communicate with my partner, whose native language was German. The hackathon consisted of 3 separate projects, all of which I was tasked to use an API to create some sort of application. The three APIs that I used were OpenMeteo, OpenFoodFacts, and OMDb API.

Personal website revamp (April 8th, 2025 - April 24th, 2025)

I’d link a demo for this project, but you’re looking at it right now! Amidst studying for two AP exams and finals, I revamped my pre-existing website with NextJS, Tailwind, and a few other tools.

Miscellaneous achievements & certs

Featured in Dev.to’s “Top 7 Posts”

I wrote a blog post about how I take notes with Neovim, which was featured in Dev.to’s “Top 7 Featured DEV posts of the week”. For context, Dev.to is a platform with 2 million software developers creating developer-focused content in the form of articles. I additionally produced a video on this topic (that took about 3 weeks to make), and that video garnered over 10 thousand views on YouTube in a week, and also garnered over 100 thousand impressions (in other words, my video was shown to 100 thousand people, and 10 thousand of those people decided to click on it). I also gained about 200 subscribers on YouTube from this video.

I also had yet another post featured on March 11th, 2025. This post was about Arch Linux and productivity. I also produced a video on this topic (that took about a month to make, and that video garnered almost 100 thousand views on Youtube in a week, and over 1 million impressions. I gained about 2 thousand subscribers from this video.

Finally, I had a third post featured on April 1st, 2025. This post was about my experiences with C, ncurses, and a few other low level libraries. I of course produced a video on this, garnering about 18 thousand views and 200 thousand impressions. I also earned the C badge on Dev.to for the most popular C-related post from the past seven days.

Academics

I had a top 3 grade in Pre-Calculus class (97.44%), and while the first two years of highschool were rocky, I maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout the last two years.

A few other notable academic achievements: I scored a 5 on the AP CSP exam, and a 1330 on the SAT (junior year, 1410 on practice test)

CS50

Completed Harvard's CS50 (introductory college level computer science course) in my sophmore year of highschool.



Stanford Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1

Completed Standford's course on Algorithms during the summer of my sophmore/junior year of highschool.



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