I wrote my first computer program back in 2019, when I was in middle school. It was a simple calculator app written in C# as I was following some YouTube tutorial on building a game from scratch with Unity. After learning the basics of C# and attempting to run the Unity game engine, my laptop crashed.

And so I switched to learning Python. This language allowed me to write some simple scripts for convenience and school projects. My most complex project at that time was a Telegram bot for a chemistry class project. It was hosted on Heroku and could quiz students on the material from our presentation and automatically select a winner.

My journey into more structured software development started quite recently, however. It started with taking CS50 near the end of my high school. For the final project I developed a Sudoku solver that used an intuitive algorithm I came up with. Using this approach, the solver can handle a standard Sudoku puzzle in just a few cycles, compared to a traditional backtracking algorithm that typically requires around 15,000 cycles. CS50 helped me organize my previously rather scattered knowledge into a clear structure and gave me a solid foundation.

Next, during the summer after my first year in college I got an internship focused on web coding and working with Large Language Models; that's where I built a full-stack web app to aid in grading data analysis students' Jupyter notebooks. This experience exposed me to real-world projects, close collaboration with teammates through GitHub, and writing clear documentation to communicate results effectively.