My menagerie

Some things I've built and worked on.

Aug 2025 -

Orbit Tried neurostimulation but thought about it harder

Designed little stimulation devices and demoed awesome effects to lots of friends
Mananged to both put people to sleep & make them feel wired!
Worked with some of the smartest people I've ever met
I love systems and brains are the coolest complex systems of all

Robotics Built competitive robots out of my garage

Started a team with my friends when I was 15 with the principle that "anyone on the driveway is part of the team"
Took some long-shots that paid off pretty well! (got to 4^th / 3300+ in the world)
I learned a lot of intention & effort (60+ hrs/week) beats any experience
Sidequest: got weirdly good at debating ref decisions and started a lifelong passion for negotiation (story for another time)

Found singularity points to be cool so started working on a 6-dof robot arm with a good friend (only 2-dofs made it out of simulation since it's pretty redundant work)
Got interested in SpaceX landings when I was 15 so I learned NLP to simulate one (GFOLD is an awesome paper)
A convex optimization library in Java
Friends beat me at chess when I was 14 so I made a questionable 2000+ rated chess engine over a weekend instead
Went deep into CV, cameras, lenses and calibration/modeling (and factor grap... I mean nonlinear least squares)
Built trajectory optimization solvers for double jointed arms and swerve drives! (lagrangian mechanics is sick)

Was absurdly competitive while working on my pinewood derby car and raingutter regatta boat
Fulfilled the cliché of building discord bots for minecraft
Spent a lot of time doing photocomposition and painting to create art with photoshop (so many layers)
Started learning how to tie knots and lashings on my eagle scout journey and find them consistently useful!

If you can't tell, I love optimization algorithms and try to apply them to everything