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Learning to program had always been a passion of mine, so I went to school for it! I've got one more year to do towards a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
I'm including personal and college projects here. I'm NOT including games I'm working on or have created, as those will be under the Games tab. Also - this isn't an exhaustive list, these are just some of my favorites :)
This was a group project for my Software Engineering class. Restaurant Finder is a web app meant to help indecisive people choose a restaurant near them. It pulls restaurants from Yelp based on a zip code entered by the user, then displays them one by one to allow the user to either thumbs-up or thumbs-down them based on if they'd consider eating there. If the user selects the thumbs-up, the restaurant remains in the list, and if they select the thumbs-down button, it is removed. This continues until only one restaurant is left, with the idea being that this is the restaurant that the user will visit.
My contribution to this project was the entire Python backend. I wrote a script to fetch the top 10 restaurants from Yelp based around the user's entered zipcode, pulling the restaurant name, rating, services (such as takeout or outdoor seating), type of food (such as Chinese or Thai), number of reviews, price range, and phone number. To do this, I utilized the Python requests library to submit an HTTP request that would return a JSON object that I could then interact with. To allow the frontend of the website to utilize the provided data, I added all of the restaurants and their info to a CSV file that could then be parsed and displayed by the frontend. The GitHub repository for my portion of the project is here.
This project was a huge learning experience for me, especially since going in, I had only a basic understanding of Python. However, throughout the fourteen hours straight I spent working on this (it ended up being more fun than I expected), I gained a more thorough knowledge of Python. Since the completion of this project, I've gone on to play around more with the language, especially exploring its applications in the field of machine learning. This ended up being my favorite Python project I've ever done :)
This was a project for a Machine Learning class I took. In this project, I again utilized Python to create a model that could identify poisonous mushrooms with relative accuracy (LEGAL DISCLAIMER: this should not be used to decide whether or not you eat a mushroom you find in your yard. This model is purely for academic purposes. Don't eat that). To find the most effective model for this project, I first tested three different ones on my training dataset of over 60,000 mushroom images - K-nearest-neighbor, support-vector machine, and random forest categorization. The support-vector model took an extremely long time to train and could only come up with an accuracy of 73%, so I threw that one out. The random forest model trained quickly but gave me an accuracy of about 99%, which, while that seems good, is actually an indication that it wouldn't perform well on the test data. The K-nearest-neighbor model struck a healthy balance between training time and accuracy (about 90%), so that was the model I ended up using.
This project gave me a more thorough understanding of Python's uses in the field of machine learning. It piqued my interest in the field greatly. In the future, I hope to use this more, especially with the emergence of AI.
I programmed this site in HTML from scratch! My goal is to make a responsive, expandable, easy-to-use website to use as a portfolio of sorts, bringing together all of the projects I'm most proud of.