samyok

nepal

Work

Jane Street

Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2024

Currently interning on the infrastructure team! Working on optimizing user queries and throughput on large datasets.

Robinhood logo

Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2023

On the options team! I architected and built out custom price alerts for options. The hardest part was efficiently reading the pricing feed (500k msg/sec) and sending user defined price alerts in near-real time at Robinhood's scale.

Fiveable logo

Software Engineer, Sep 2021 - Aug 2022

I took a gap year between high school and college to work as a full time SWE! They had just raised a 10M Series A. As the entire engineering team was only 8 people, I worked on a large variety of projects. My favorite was leading the development of a new WebRTC voice and video calling feature that we hosted ourselves, and scaling that up to general availability.

Art of Problem Solving logo

Curriculum Developer (part time), Aug 2021 - Present

I work on CodeWOOT! Most of my time is spent developing engaging and challenging problem sets, practice exams, and handouts for AoPS's premier online competitive coding training program. Curriculum in C++. I used to be a teaching assistant in various math and programming classes in online classes of 20-50 students, but I've been more on the curriculum side lately. My role as a TA was largely to answer questions, guide students, and help debug in the live classes.

Developer, Sep 2019 - Aug 2022

Developed custom PHP image gallery and file storage server to be used by more than 68,000 registered users. Implemented an image optimization service to reduce image file sizes by up to 80% and serve at the edge.

Projects

A few startup-y projects, a lot of hackathon projects, and some other random ones:

Resume Builder logo

Resume Builder

react-based resume builder (acquired)

Originally launched for my (and my roommates') resume building purposes, over a hundred people have used it to build their own resumes. EssaySwap acquired it in mid 2024.

resume.yok.dev

EssaySwap logo

EssaySwap

p2p college essay reviewing

A platform for students to get their essays reviewed by other students. I'm helping them expand into the resume building/reviewing space.


Gopher Grades logo

Gopher Grades

UMN grade distributions (~40k users)

I started a grade transparency tool designed for students at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. The project is currently used by over 40K students and receives over 5M views per semester. I also built the chrome extension that adds features to a bunch of internal UMN websites, and it has about 3k weekly active users and a 5 star rating.


Hearshot logo

Hearshot

police radio transcriber

Having been at a mall during a shooting, I wanted to build something more effective at safety alerts than just Citizen and Twitter. This was the inspiration behind our first ever hardware hack! We built an antenna that listens to police radio transmissions, transcribes them on-device, and sends push notifications if there's danger in their proximity. Not wanting to spend $400 for a pre-built police receiver, we built our own receiver from a Raspberry Pi and a RTL-SDR dongle. We won 2nd place at LAHacks '23!


Clippy Goose logo

Clippy Goose

AI video editor

Over the course of this hackathon, we filmed as much of ourselves having fun as we could—programming, talking to others, playing with a dog named Jackson, trying to remember names, food review, everything—to use as input for Google's Gemini. With the help of Gemini, our project auto-curated a selection of highlights from the many hours of filming complete with selecting transitions, music (generated as well!), and timing. Most of the hackathon was wrangling ~20 hours of GoPro footage into a format that Gemini could understand and edit. We won Google's Gemini Prize at LAHacks 2024 :)


Lecture Ninja logo

Lecture Ninja

processing video for slide changes with SIFT

Transcribes lecture videos, detects when slides are changed, and has a very sexy UI. Most of the interesting work here was done in the backend. We used SIFT to detect slide changes in the video, and then we used that information to split the video into segments based on the slides. We won 2nd at TAMUhack 2022!


Greyduck logo

Greyduck

code revision suggestions pre-chatgpt

Suggest and explain revisions to code to facilitate learning, via a VSCode extension and an ensemble model. Technical details are on our Devpost and Github. We won top 5 overall as well as the YCombinator prize at HackMIT 2022. This was super fun to build (and we felt really cool!) right before ChatGPT released two months later.


Honk logo

Honk

focusing chrome extension

After unsuccessfully trying to create a VR hack for watching movies with friends together, we pivoted to create a browser extension that helps users be more aware of when they get off topic while studying. It uses some basic sentence embeddings to detect when a user is going down a rabbit hole or changing topics in a way unconducive to learning. We won first overall in CuseHacks 2022!


Anony.news logo

Anony.news

real time blurring rtmp proxy

Automatically blurs protestors’ faces to alleviate the risk of them being identified from media coverage. The selective whitelist allows reporters to continue business as usual—providing crucial exposure—while avoiding putting those around them at risk. The core function of the platform is a real-time RTMP proxy that existing video feeds can be passed through seamlessly before being streamed on platforms such as YouTube or Twitch or broadcasted to live television. As a proof of concept, the website integrates with YouTube Live but the easily-accessed RTMP URI can be used anywhere. Won 3rd overall at SantaClara '22!


3Draw logo

3Draw

real time vr drawing

Half of our team had recently won VR headsets at a previous hackathon. Eventually, the novelty of Beat Saber, Gorilla Tag and other somewhat dubious activities wore off so we decided to make something ourselves, drawing inspiration from various party games. 3Draw is our take on a long series of thing-drawing games like skribbl.io or Gartic Phone. A silly hack that stands out via our chaotic, AI-powered, voice-chat guessing system and largely dysfunctional artistic tools. Our submission for HackIllinois 2022.


Vibeo logo

Vibeo

(local) llama-powered video notebook

A knowledge base that allows you to store videos, write notes on them or even annotate on the video, and then query everything with natural language. You can even share your vaults, taking notes with your friends, an incredibly common college student pastime. Woo, real-time collaboration. It also (mostly) works offline! You can still search, upload videos, draw on them, and all that fun stuff. If you're like me, your vault will even still have the same number of collaborators! We used LLMs to synthesize information across videos but it's just barely infeasible to run a 30B parameter model on an M1 Mac. Our 13B model was not very cooperative. Our HackPrinceton 2023 submission.


Accountability Aly logo

Accountability Aly

accountability/implementation challenge

At NYU's hackathon, we gave ourselves a challenge: we were going to build an app, chrome extension, and a website in 21 hours. We made a tool to hold yourself accountable for your goals by sending embarrassing texts to your friends if you don't stay on track -- similar to Honk but extended to generic tasks instead of just focus. We won 1st in Education/Top 3 Overall :)


Annote logo

Annote

live local transcription and annotation

We built our own local live-transcription service with Whisper as a base, as well as our own from-scratch annotation tool compiled into a native iOS app. We won 1st place at HackUIowa 2022!


cine.stream logo

cine.stream

Apr 2021

For my first ever hackathon, my sister and I created a 3D watch together space without three.js or the like -- just pure CSS transforms. This was intentional; we wanted to give ourselves the challenge of creating a pure-css 3D environment. We ended up winning first place and $600 at SonomaHacks. Lots of info is on our DevPost; check it out!


Bobcat Notify logo

Bobcat Notify

first app! built for my high school

Designed, programmed, and published iOS and Android app for Brookings High School students for fast and reliable emergency alerts. 2000+ downloads over the last year (BHS has ~800 students). The Brookings School District was in talks to purchase the app for every school in the district, but those talks got cancelled due to COVID. Coded in React Native with Node/Express/MongoDB/Firestore backend.


SongSmash logo

SongSmash

Apr 2021

Use your webcam to smash your favorite songs! Play any beat saber map with a webcam, powered by Tensorflow and ThreeJS! All of the 3D animations in-game were done with three.js. The UI was built with React and node.js. Models of the boxes and hands were made in Blender. ParticlesJS was used to make the particle effects in the background, and PoseNet was used to track the player's pose on the webcam. We made this for Los Altos Hacks 2021 and didn't win anything, although it was a super fun project :)


devJS logo

devJS

iOS/Android code editor

devJS provides an internet-free code editor and interpreter to developers with a bundled NodeJS binary. devJS runs a compiled version of NodeJS ChakraCore on iOS and uses Termux on Android. We used React Native to build the 'front-end' of our application, which includes defining transitions between screens using the StackNavigator.


Dakota Debate Institute logo

Dakota Debate Institute

Jul 2021 - Present

I was the director for South Dakota's overnight high school debate camp during my gap year! We hosted around 50 students with 8 staff members in the summer of 2022. On top of the logistical work, I managed the fundraising, advertising, and development of surprisingly many custom tools and websites for the camp, especially when it was all remote in 2021. While we can't claim all of their success, our alumni have gone on to win many tournaments, including the State Tournament and 3rd at the National Tournament :) South Dakota State University has since taken over DDI and expanded it to more forensics events.


Google Code In logo

Google Code In

Winter 2019-2020

Google Code In is an initiative that allowed students to complete tasks for open source organizations. I participated with SugarLabs, an organization that maintains the Sugar OS on the >3 million One Laptop Per Child laptops in underdeveloped areas. First year: worked on MusicBlocks and SugarLabs website, fixing bugs. Second year: worked on MusicBlocks; expanded export and import functionality to more file types; proposed and created a Git-based version history system for blocky-code; tested and experimented with the viability of refactoring the entire codebase into a Model-View-Controller design.


typpo/textbelt

open source email to sms gateway

Contributing to this was one of my first forays into open source, I refactored the transporter from mutt to nodemailer.


BHS Science Olympiad

2019-2020

Simple create-react-app with Material UI to create a 'dashboard' for the BHS SciOly team I captained for 3 years.


slideforthe.world

Feb 2019

I made most of this in a 12-hour sprint to win first place at SDSU's Programming Design Contest! It was a competitive multiplayer version of the picture puzzle gadget from Windows 7, but most of the files corrupted and the source is no longer available 😔


Scioly Chrome Extension

Sep 2019

My first chrome extension and my first project for Scioly.org. I've since added (or helped add) all of the features, except for infinite scrolling, to the main scioly.org website.


Superfight

Aug 2021

I made this as a small playtest for NextJS and Chakra UI. It was used as an activity for Dakota Debate Institute. The rules are simple: the players pick a card each and then argue over who would win in a battle to the death.


Webshare

Apr 2020

A bare-bones screensharing application that I made to test out WebRTC during our first two week quarantine.


BHS Prom Tickets

Mar - Apr 2021

A MERN-stack application that was the sole ticket and meal management platform for Brookings High School's 2021 Prom. Used to great success managing tickets, meals, and seating. Managed authentication so students could verify their eligibility to purchase tickets.


Portfolio template made by Samyok Nepal | View on Github