In the Spring of 2015, I took the course CS 169: Software Engineering. One of the main components of the class was a semester-long project in which teams of six students would work with an external non-profit organization to solve an issue of theirs using a Software as a Service solution. My team was assigned to the Berkeley Student Cooperative, a student-run organization that offered afforadble housing in return for a required number of hours of housework each week from the residents.

The BSC currently used an online portal developed by one of their residents in around 2005, and while it was fully functional, it presented its users with an extremely unfriendly user interface, and lacked a number of features the work shift managers strongly desired to speed up their management tasks.

Cal Raijin Taiko is UC Berkeley’s Japanese drumming performance ensemble, founded in 2005. I joined the team my first year of college, in 2012. Though the team had an existing website already, it was difficult to update and maintain, as it required someone with the knowledge and experience to remote login to a server and edit the HTML of the live site.

In the summer of 2014, I decided to try and create a new web app for the team that would simplify the upkeep process significantly. My solution was a Ruby on Rails app that allowed authorized users to log in and update the site using simple forms and intuitive interactions. When the new site went live that September, it was incredibly rewarding to see the fruits of my summer labor pay off.

Until only recently, Berkeley students have juggled a number of websites to access their student information: grades and registration information were hosted on one website, financial aid found on another, and yet another site existed for class schedules and assignments. In 2014, Berkeley ETS introduced CalCentral, a new online portal designed to combine the information from the multitude of older websites and present it in a single location.

Over the summer of 2014, I worked with the Berkeley Law School to develop a Law student-specific experience for their students when they accessed CalCentral. Though CalCentral worked wonderfully well for the majority of Berkeley students, Law School users had a number of different needs that were going unmet. Through the changes I implemented, they would be presented with information drawn from the Law School’s internal APIs, see entirely separate external links, and receive more relevant news and updates.

CalCentral was developed using Ruby on Rails and AngularJS, neither of which I had worked on prior to that summer. This made familiarizing myself with the existing codebase quite intimidating at the start, especially with the added complexity of understanding the multitude of different Berkeley APIs being called in various sections of the application. But learning to work with these tools and seeing my code eventually incorporated into such a large-scale project was incredibly rewarding.

One of the classes I’ve enjoyed most as an undergrad was CS70, a course on Discrete Mathematics and probability theory. In particular, I was fascinated by our studies on modular arithmetic, and how it related to cryptography.

As we covered RSA encryption and Fermat’s Little Theorem, I began thinking about how I might implement an encryption algorithm on my own. Using the topics we learned that semester, I came up with Encoder: a desktop application made using Java Swing that utilizes modular arithmetic to encrypt files at the byte level.