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Hello! I'm Wolf. I'm a CS undergrad at Case Western and Bard HS Early College grad. I'm also a two time alum of Recurse Center an open ended NYC based programming retreat. Currently I'm interning at Val Town, a easy and fun functions-as-service platform.

At Case, I'm a 2024 Veale Snyder fellow, member of the SEC allocations commitee, vice president of Linux club, and president of board game club.

I'm interested in creating complex, technically interesting developer tools. I love tinkering with frameworks and configuration, and am always learning new tools. I enjoy webdev because of how many different frameworks I get to learn and how widespread and powerful the web is. And, I love consistency and reproducability; I'm particularly interested in nix/nixos, containerizing & devOps. I've had a variety of eclectic hobbies like fermenting yogurt and closet hydroponics, I love everything caffeine, and am also really into strategy board games and occasionally RPGs (my favorites are probably Inis, TI4, and Dead of Winter).

In general, I'm very meticulous and curious. I love taking notes (I'm a Obsidian geek), and care deeply about open-source and data centralization/monopolization and privacy. I fear of heavily relying on software day-to-day only to have it go down unexpectedly or stop in the future. I'm a Nix nerd, and love its guarantees and complex theory. I find it fascinating how generally useful it is, and its ergonomics. When I code, I aim for style as much as precision (I love monads!), and, I enjoy programming things that yes, are genuinely useful, but that are technically interesting and approach things in unique ways.

I began my coding journey in high school; one of my first personal coding projects was a D&D character sheet viewing tool, and I quickly after starting writing many scripts, from managing my computer's windows to many other automation tools. Over 10th grade summer, I began my first larger-scale personal project: Minecraft username sniping. It was a very simple concept that was, in practice, extremely complicated and fun to implement. I coded systems to automatically attempt to grab desirable usernames (like real-world usernames) at the exact millisecond they were to free up (after users changed their username), and then held auctions to resell the accounts with the valuable names that my bots automatically claimed. It was exhilarating to work on such a fast-paced and quickly growing project: I sharpened my understanding of OOP and Python designging an automated deployment system to queue username "snipes" with automated SFTP, integrating with APIs, and some fun, complemented async Python. By the end of summer, Mojang began made breaking changes to their API and I sold our inventory of accounts, but by the end it was clear that software was definitely the right path for me.

In 12th grade I set up a custom data-structures tutorial-course with another student and our CS professor, where I got to learn the basics of some CS concepts that I missed during my more informal project-based experiences. In the 'course,' since I and a peer were the first to undergo it, we worked to design a curriculum for us, but also for future students, since the plan is to eventually make it a regular class at my former school. Around the same time, I also began working on a DNA-Nanotech design tool, which took the form of a research project with my physics professor. It let me more meaningfully apply the skills I picked up informally, and was a great opportunity to learn more about the issues accompanying UI/UX design and maintainability. Integrating CS into a completely unfamiliar field was really fun and rewarding. Via the project I was able to create a design tool of my own, which was something I'd always wanted to do, and towards the end of the year, I had a great experience attending the Nadrian Seeman Memorial at NYU, learning more about the field and its frontiers.

However, since graduating, I've shifted my focus to explore additional new CS areas. When working on my Minecraft sniping service I was quite engrossed in the idea of backend API design and wanted to look further into webdev. To start, I decided to self-teach the fundamentals of HTML/CSS, to create a basic about-me page for myself. At around the same time, I decided that it'd be best to put the knowledge to use building more advanced personal website, since I've found that my favorite way to learn is through implementing into projects with actual utility, and it was through this initial dive into front-end, along with being surrounded by many other amazing techies at Recurse, where I (perhaps as usual) spiraled down a chain of rabbit-holes that led me to spend significant time learning javascript/typescript, react and nextjs, and various other fullstack tools like postgres and S3. I came to once again find a love working with the tooling of the field, just like tinkering with design software when I was younger.

Now, at Case, I've been diving further into the weeds of CS through more formal courses. It has been very interesting to see what happens 'under the hood,' and to understand some of the math behind computer systems. Last year I took a Linux Scripting and Tools class, which has been amazing, and has completely changed my computer interaction trajectory; it's turned me into a Linux geek. Learning about so many super cool hacky tools like vim, grep, and awk has been sublime. I also particularly enjoyed my computer networks course, and especially learning about TCP and lower level networking protocols.

During my first year, I began been dabbling with hardware a bit, working on a robot that sorts coins by date. I was awarded a student project grant from our campus makerspace earlier this year, and have been focusing on CAD and actually building the robot. I'm planning on building out a Django backend to interface with the Raspberry Pi that actually drives the bot, and do the image analysis to read dates off coins. I also recently won my school's hackathon with two friends, with a project that uses a fine tuned OpenAI model to scan all events on campus and find those with free food.

Most recently I've been working on learning Nix, Nixos, and Bash/UNIX related things at a second Recurse center batch. I've been getting a lot more comfortable with linux, and the command line. My goal for the summer has been to take the magic out of the tooling I rely on, since I enjoy having a clear understanding of what things do. I've also been working on a larger scoped project to get a fully featured android emulator to run with low latency in the browser, which is still very much a work in progress.