This summer I interned on the Developer Tools team at Apple! It was an amazing experience, and the sort of thing I had been dreaming about for years.[1] I got the chance to help improve the tools that we use every day, learn more about lower-level Apple technologies, and meet tons of other Apple engineers.
This semester, I worked part-time on the mobile team at MailChimp here in Atlanta. This was my second time at MailChimp (I interned on the same team in 2016), and I had even more fun this time around!
MailChimp used to focus exclusively on email, but they’ve been broadening their horizons quite a bit lately. You can now create online ads, landing pages, and even physical postcards through MailChimp! While I was there this Spring, I worked on a new flow for our mobile app that lets users create and manage their Facebook ads right on their phone.
Georgia Tech’s 2018 Greek Week was April 2 - 9! This year, 27 fraternities and 10 sororities competed in over 30 events. We had field day classics like Egg Toss and Dizzy Bat, sport tournaments like Flag Football and Dodgeball, and other mainstays like Tug and Greek Sing. We had a team of 15 people working hard to make it the best Greek Week ever. I was our Technology Chair this year, and I got the chance to work on some pretty cool stuff! I worked with our new Tech Committee to build out mobile-friendly web projects like a new Calendar website, and I led the charge on organizing our first-ever Greek Week hackathon!
Bailout (one of my favorite events) — teams compete in an olympic swimming pool (literally, a swimming pool from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics) to sink the other team's canoe.
Tug — one of our largest events, teams compete in a tug-of-war tournament in a mud pit
Greek Sing — 5 fraternities and 5 fraternities put on a show with song and dance
Recently I was at MinneHack in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a pretty short hackathon (only 19 hours of hacking!), but it was a great time! We hacked together a project called Twitter Assistants. It was one of the hackiest hacks we ever hacked, but it’s certainly pretty interesting.
The Project
Twitter Assistants is a twitter bot that lets you ask questions to Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant at the same time. You could tweet a question to @Assistants_MH, your question is sent to each of the assistants, and then they send back a reply to your tweet.
AR Planes is now available to download on the App Store! It lets you discover nearby planes in augmented reality – just point your camera to see all the planes around you. I’ve been working on it for a long time, so I’m really excited to finally put it out there!
Window has been on the App Store for around a year and a half, but until now its only been available in English. After gaining valuable experience from translating Blurb into Spanish and Chinese, I decided it was a good time to give Window the same treatment. With some hard work and outside help, Window is now available for download in English, Spanish, and French!
Blurb is a photo editor for iOS that lets you add customizable blurred backgrounds to your photos. I prototyped it at WWDC 2015 and published it on the App Store later that year. This new version is Blurb’s first major update, and it brings along support for Spanish and Chinese, a new look, and tons of other small fixes.
Emoji Names is an iOS app I first wrote back in 2015. It shows you the Unicode name of any given Emoji, with immersive full-screen animations. This is the first big update for Emoji Names, bringing several new features that make the app feel a lot more useful.
Last weekend I was at UB Hacking 2017 in Buffalo, NY. It was a 24-hour hackathon at the University of Buffalo, and the trip was one of my favorites of the semester!
The Project
We built an augmented reality Android app called Mario Sketchbook. The app itself is a pen-and-paper platformer. On paper, the user can draw a game world with their own desired objects and platforms. The app captures their hand-drawn world and adds Mario to it! Mario can run and jump around on the drawn shapes.
We built an app called Nametag AR that detects and remembers the names of people you meet. The app listens in the background for when people introduce themselves to you. When it detects an introduction (like “Hi, I’m Jake”), it saves the person’s name and an image of their face.
