The thing I love about Minecraft the most is its development scene. It was one of the key factors that inspired me to pursue software development in the first place. When I was living with my mom back in Norfolk in the 1st grade, I was playing Minecraft a lot. Making a cozy little hut in the mountainside for my single-player world, or fighting off players in Hypixel’s Bedwars minigame. However, the thing that rang true for me was the first time I realized that I could change the code of the game, which was quite literally a game-changer for my whole experience of the game. I would spend hours learning new techniques: making custom mobs, blocks, items, and worlds for me to play on. Eventually, this evolved into something more. From my readings, I discovered the world of server-side development and began making my own plugins. From there I joined communities for development and even made some of my own from friends from my middle school, and I got to learn a lot more about the JVM - writing new silly commands, learning about advanced terrain generation, and little new coding techniques. I kept practicing, for dozens of hours every month, getting better and better. Once I started getting into extracurriculars, I was able to really apply my coding skills to the real world, from making underwater robotics to winning coding competitions, I was able to realize a new path for myself, and I really wanted to pursue computer science as a software engineer - all thanks to Minecraft.

As an avid computer scientist, my goal is to help other developers create robust software - from more productive end-to-end testing to improving languages and compilers. As of now, I already love doing that! I contribute to open-source software, fixing bugs in libraries or doing codebase refactors for launch panels. I also love competing and making sure my skills are up to par - between underwater robots and coding competitions, I absolutely love to get myself out there! Most of all, though, I love helping, either by making websites or widgets that my family or friends need, or helping teach design and coding to my peers. However, from both my hobbyistic time spent making side projects or contributing, to various extracurriculars that combined my coding efforts with my school, I realized that there is a huge gap in the reliability of software from big companies and respected library maintainers and software that many people rely on. For example, the software at Google may be reliable, with a dedicated staff team per project, but since "every company is a software company," many smaller companies that can't spare such expenses are left with poorly made software from poorly made tools. Interestingly enough, though, unlike many other fields, software is fungible and can be copied, which people do in the form of libraries! Yet we design libraries that are intended for use by these big software companies, and not libraries for smaller businesses with the power tools they need to succeed. This worry about small production systems stems from small interactions in my childhood. Whenever my mom and I would travel around the East Coast, we would meet all sorts of people who always found themselves in little predicaments. From taking the Greyhound and seeing small ticketing errors from unreliable software that would cripple families to rescheduled flights because of cybersecurity attacks. This common thread occurred everywhere, where the tools that many relied on were broken from a series of bugs left unpatched for years. We would always fix the surface issue, and maybe help them reschedule (with many hour-long calls), but that underlying root issue always remained: poorly designed software. That’s why I’m absolutely set on bolstering every corner of the software development community and creating a better development ecosystem in the process. From starting small and designing my own libraries that bring strongly rooted software to other ecosystems, and hopefully, with the pursuit of my undergraduate education, something more.

I want to make it easier for people to do their jobs. By focusing on systems and architecture in computer science, I aim to prepare myself to write robust and resilient software that can help in critical systems - from healthcare to mission systems, to help all. It may have started when I realized that I could write a website for my friend's parent's business to succeed, or write quiz software that teachers can use to help teach their students in a fun way. From wherever it may have started, I want to turn my deep drive for programming into something that can help people all around the world. When I was younger, I saw my mom help a lot of people wherever we went - whether helping them get a room, or finding them a cheap place to get food, I knew I wanted to help as well, but I couldn't figure out with what. That's when I noticed a common pattern in many troubles people had, whether it was delayed bus tickets because of a system malfunction, or incorrect information displayed, simply because there wasn't enough reassurance that changes can be made safely. However, as I researched more and looked closer at the way that we build software around the world, I learned that a lot of the unreliability of software can be avoided! With proper tests, documentation, and the right language, it was always possible to create good software, but these techniques were left to the top open-source libraries or the best-in-class companies. Companies that needed good software but couldn’t afford top-of-the-line developers were left in the back. However, with the right toolkit, resources, and integrated testing, it's possible to expand these tools to every developer who needs them. That’s what I want to focus on in my undergraduate education (and maybe further) - to go deep into the lifecycle of development from different developers and help them write amazing software that never falters, regardless of where they’re from. In my free time, I write my own projects (or as I like to call them, sketches) to learn more about software development, and I already contribute to open-source libraries and applications to help make them just a tad bit more reliable. I also work in tandem with my underwater robotics club, that way I can get hands-on experience with working with the most unreliable of conditions - the boundary between computation and engineering, in hopes that I can apply this knowledge and engineer new tools to bolster our software community, for everyone.