First of all, I am honored by the nomination! It is always a good feeling to be recognized for your work.
You can check my GitHub profile @Apexal for an overview of my open source work, all of which is for the benefit of either the immediate RPI community, local communities in my native Bronx, or for friends and family. To date, I have made over 6,900 contributions on GitHub within my time at RPI. I have also worked as a freelance developer with non-profits in the need of custom software in the Bronx and greater NYC area.
I've volunteered hundreds of hours through my RPI career developing applications for the student body. Some work has been in RCOS for credit, and other work has been purely volunteer work for multiple departments on campus. These have exponentially grown both my hard and soft skills. I was able to get a wonderful internship opportunity in NYC last summer thanks in large part to my body of open source work. While I do not develop for the purpose of furthering my career, it has certainly had that effect. Here is a list of some projects I am most proud of, in no particular order.
https://github.com/Apexal/late
Within the first week of RPI, I joined RCOS and started a project to manage the RPI courseload. I started off as a freshman managing a team of over a dozen students and spent countless hours freshman year balancing classes, managing the RCOS project, developing for the project, and a Computer Science teaching job. It was both the best of times and the worst of times! I was recognized for my effort by being requested to become a RCOS Coordinator at the end of freshman year. I do not know of any other RCOS member in history that became a Coordinator that early. I developed and used LATE for 2 years, open to BETA testers, reaching a total of 2,900+ commits in the repository and learning an unbelievable amount in the process. It confirmed my desire to want to be a project manager in my career. While I ran it in RCOS, it was the most prolific RCOS project. This project gave me innumerable examples of challenges I had to face both technical and social that aided me in both the interview process for jobs as well as the actual day to day work of my first internship.
https://github.com/Apexal/orca
I created an open source RPI course API for any RPI students to use in their own projects. I wanted to democratize schedule data so that anyone can build their own tools like the course schedulers popular amongst the student body at RPI. I also intend for this to be used by ITWS projects who I believe would greatly benefit from free access to this data. This project taught me the importance of API design and standardization, which I was briefly introduced to during my internship and can now further my experience with this summer as I will be returning to the firm for another internship.
https://github.com/rcos/rcos-data https://github.com/rcos/rcos-discord https://github.com/rcos/rcos-automation
As Coordinator of RCOS, the Rensselaer Center of Open Source, I took it upon myself to modernize the organization's data. There have been longstanding issues in how disorganized RCOS has been to the detriment of Coordinators, Faculty Advisors, and members alike. I spent my entire summer (while working at my internship) researching relational databases and designed an all-encompassing RCOS database which all future infrastructure will pull from. I also was able to switch the organization to use Discord and developed full automation tools to manage the server, verify student identities, and do all administrative tasks. I am now taking on the role of community builder in RCOS as the other Coordinators continue to build infrastructure on the foundations I set. This greatly furthered my understanding of SQL, database design, and knowledge management systems.
https://github.com/Apexal/rpi-asc
As we went online, the CS Department could no longer run their typical in-person Accepted Students Day events, including 1-on-1 meetings with current students and a CS club fair. I was able to develop a real-time platform for the CS Department that had a queue that accepted students can join in order to be claimed by approved current students who could contact them. Both sides would enter in their contact information so that current students could reach out either over a phone call, Zoom call, etc. to talk with the accept students. This was used two years in a row (unfortunately!) and I was happy to volunteer to help the CS Department. I worked with School of Science Advising Hub senior staff to define the scope of the project and train the approved current students on its used both years. This was another great experience learning how to develop to a client's specifications and to ensure a reliable, stable product which was greatly needed.
I also was able to create and coordinate a communication server to run a Virtual CS Club fair in tandem with the 1-on-1 meetings platform both years.
https://github.com/rplotka/ITWSDiscordBot https://github.com/Apexal/discord-cas
After becoming a ITWS&CS dual major, I recognized the need for a central communication platform for the major. ITWS is a rather small and close-knit program and would greatly benefit from such a platform. During remote learning, professors were also looking for good options for course communication channels. With my prior major experience with Discord server management and automation, I volunteered to create such a platform with the approval of the ITWS Program Director. I setup the ITWS Discord server and spearheaded automation tools for professors who decided to move their courses to it. I developed an open source Discord bot that allows any RPI-affiliated organizations (official or not) to verify the idenities of members before gaining access to the server. As a result, every single member on the ITWS Discord server has had their identity verified and has their name and RCS ID set as their display name, making it extremely easy for faculty to identify students.
(private repository)
I was requested by a local non-profit to develop an online fundraising platform for 50-50 raffles. I volunteered to do this freely though was paid after the project met with great success. This was my first major freelance project for a client that seriously depended on my work. I created a comprehensve, real-time fundraising platform to the exact specifications of the client with whom I would meet multiple times a week. This was during the school year along with my courses, teaching job, and open source projects. The platform I developed cost the organization nothing to develop and there is no maintenance fees at all thanks to using the Google Firebase platform. This small non-profit that offers services to Bronx families, specifically women and children, has to this date profitted over $40,000 through my platform and I continue to work with the client to develop more systems for them. Naturally, this project has been extremely helpful to my career development as I can now say I have serious experience working with a client, determining requirements and scope, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining.
I can provide more examples of projects if requested.