hi, i'm b (they/she)

I build things with computers.[jump to projects]

I do coding, hardware hacking, music, prototyping, fire spinning, and other forms of creative making.

I’m particularly interested in human-computer interaction and systems design/programming. I want to build things to improve how we develop systems and interact with computers and sound more broadly.

I’m currently a second-year CS major (and possibly music minor?) at Reed College in Portland, OR.

I have 5 years of experience working at companies in the tech industry (and trying my hand at starting my own!), and I’ve been working on my own projects for even longer. I’ve built technically interesting projects and solved important problems - some of the work I’m most proud of has been

  • building awesome programs and projects (like Blot) that let high schoolers discover the joy of coding, hardware hacking, and digital fabrication, at Hack Club
  • automating complex image processing workflows entirely in-browser, at Gigantic
  • co-founding and building a visual programming environment to make machine learning more accessible to everyone, at Kobra (#3 on HN and featured in Product Hunt’s newsletter!)
  • researching and designing the hardware/software of an open source COVID ventilator for low-resource communities (buildable in a few hours with a few hundred dollars and a smartphone), at Kernel Labs
  • prototyping a self-driving robot, also at Kernel Labs

I’m currently looking for an internship for summer ‘24 - if you want to work together (or chat about anything else) feel free to email me at [my first name + my last name (smith) + @ + reed college’s website].

projects!

I’ve worked on way too many things to list all of them here (most should be on my GitHub), so here’s a selection of some of what I’m doing right now + some of my favorites from the past:

  • amonitor, a pretty Arduino serial monitor written in OCaml
  • a currently-unnamed isomorphic midi keyboard/synthesizer (very WIP source code here, more details hopefully soon)
  • Obl.ong, a nonprofit that provides free subdomains with an easy-to-use management dashboard to everyone
  • truthtabl.es, a truth table generator, (basic) proof builder, and more - uses a parser built with Ohm to implement all the logic from scratch!
  • Niue, a tiny shared state and event library for React (and plain JS!)
  • contributed to the Spotify Car Thing hacking scene by making a working/buildable reconstruction of the TypeScript source of the frontend webapp, making it possible to add features to the original UI
  • choc_ergo, an ergonomic keyboard kit with a beautiful PCB that was hand-drawn in a vector graphics editor
  • experimental-type-lang, a weird experimental functional programming language built on the idea of storing all data as unit values and arrays
  • developed the plugin system of Devzat, a popular SSH chat server, as well as a client library and multiple plugins
  • emojibot, a Slack emoji uploader bot used by >75 people in Hack Club
  • Reflection editor, a self-hosting web code editor built to experiment with modern web technologies