academic projects

Significant Academic Projects

BACK END DATA VISUALIZATION ENGINEER: 02/2018 to 05/2018

Code for San Francisco Congressional Data Challenge: Data Science Team, Capstone Project.

Explored, organized, and transformed raw campaign finance data for political candidates in California from 2010 to 2016 into features for the predictive models and Client-Side Team.

• Contributed to a documented, functional pipeline allowing peer review, mentor progress, and project reproduction on GitHub.

• Preprocessed raw CSV data by identifying missing and null values attributes for 1,502,264 rows, resulting in 10 out of 27 columns having anomalies with PostgreSQL queries.

• Explored data and identified specific characteristics to draw feature correlations for various Data Science algorithms.

• Derived statistical significance of the average campaign contribution per election cycle and displayed it in the Team’s final presentation.

• Supplied and standardized data for populating the Client-Side Team’s Django database.

• Tool Chain: PostgreSQL | Mode Analytics | Trello | GitHub | gitLFS | Google Hangouts | Slack 

SOFTWARE ENGINEER: 09/2017 to 12/2017

Software Engineering Meta Course, Final Project Wiki.

Team designed and implemented large-scale software application utilizing software principles: Movie Insight.

• Collaborative program analysis and specifications including technologies, platform, web clients, search results,  themoviedb.org API, and persistent user's activities within specifications and deadlines.

• Constructed UML designs and reviewed various actors, user cases, classes, database relationships, and sequential diagrams which expressed conceptual ideas.

• Produced wire framing diagrams that recognized interactions and usability issues.

• Applied Circle CI, conducted PHPUnit testing, and authored custom alerts throughout resulting in faster development and code reusability.

• Team implemented HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and PHP coding including AJAX and SQL queries to facilitate the software product and demonstrating proficiency.

• Established a tool chain to execute continuous integration and deployment that assist with detecting problems early.

• Communicated with Slack bi-weekly and in person stand up meetings with the aim of tracking application advancements or issues, which were posted on the progression board.

• Tool Chain: Cloud9 | GitHub | Heroku | Circle CI | Slack | MySQL Workbench  | Trello | Wireframe | UML User Cases

GRAPHICS / RENDERING ENGINEER: 12/2017

Game Development Fundamentals and GPU Programming, Final Project.

Focused on real-time rendering, HLSL shader systems, and low-level DirectX 11 GPU pipeline development: Real Time 3D Flight Simulator.

• Engineered a custom Direct3D 11 rendering pipeline using COM interface pointers for devices, swap chains, render targets, depth buffers, and pipeline state objects.

• Designed GPU data flow using C++ constant buffer structs composed of DirectXMath matrix and vector types to pass transforms, camera data, lighting values, and animated water parameters to shaders.

• Implemented separate HLSL vertex and pixel shaders for flying objects, heightmapped terrain, animated water, skybox, and billboard systems.

• Created and managed GPU vertex/index buffers and texture resources using Direct3D buffer descriptors and shader resource views.

• Generated heightmap-based terrain with multi-texture blending and built a shader-driven water surface with time-based wave motion.

• Developed a skybox and camera-facing billboard system using arrays of transformation matrices, including depth-sorted transparency via custom sorting logic.

• Performed camera, projection, and lighting calculations using SIMD-optimized DirectXMath types, enabling full per-pixel ambient, diffuse, and specular lighting.

• Tool Chain: C++ | DirectX 11 | HLSL | Visual Studio 2017 

FULL STACK DEVELOPER: 05/2017

Internet Programming, Final Project (live - refactored in 2024)

Conceived, designed and implemented a website with specific constraints, centralizing on the integration of server-side programming, database connectivity, and client-side scripting resulting in a dynamic web application: Comic-Ink.

• Generated a user story, website mock-up, and a simple database entity relationship diagram fabricating a final template that captured the project information and requirements.

• Designed and implemented JawsDB (DBaaS) with several tables using CRUD and Restful services in PHP and MySQL providing meaningful content for Users or Admins.

• Propagated several reports which used aggregated functions by AJAX calls from data.

• Embedded CSS3 and Bootstrap within HTML5 to present a nice and consistent User Interface.

• Interactive controlled functionality with JavaScript and JQuery, enhancing the user’s overall experience.

• Tool Chain: Cloud9 | GitHub | Heroku | MySQL Workbench | MVC Framework | Visual Studio 2017

2024 Changes

• Compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) with continued research and testing methodology. 

• Expanded and updated SQL database, MySQL queries, and third party libraries for comic books, graphic novels, and comic/pop culture conventions.

• Implemented Bootstrap 5.3 framework for responsive, mobile-first front-end web development.

• PHP 8.1 upgrade from 7.4 - Increase security, functionality, and modernization. 

• Tool Chain: a2hosting | GitHub | cPanel | phpMyAdmin | FileZilla | VS Code 2024