hi, i'm b (they/she)

I build things with computers.[jump to projects]

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

I’m currently a second-year CS major 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!). 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 that let high schoolers discover the joy of coding and hardware hacking, 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
  • 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