Past Projects

ChimpBase.com: January - April 2023

Click image below for 1 minute demo video:

Watch the video

Status: 🚫 shut down

  • successful webapp, ~6k users.
  • Feed it a textbook, a lecture video, or a website. Ask questions - get back accurate answers, complete with citations and timestamp links to how it found them.
  • Great demonstration of SEO's power - used a blog and company twitter to drive traffic to the site.
  • It was very exciting to see more and more users come each day
  • it was hard to collect feedback, but we did see a portion of them keep coming back and uploading more documents which was a good sign.
  • Great introduction to vector databases, llms, and a consumer-ready product that was very useful for students.
  • Was a prize winner at Cozad New Venture Challenge 2023
  • I knew I would need to find a more unique value proposition than semantic search and summaries for homework, or else I'd be outpaced fairly quickly within a few months by a larger company.
  • Graduated and entered to full-time employment to focus on learning more about an industry and how to build and evaluate solutions and make long term sustainable engineering choices.

Tech Features:

  • Manipulated embeddings and stored in vector database
  • Summarize infinite-length videos, pdfs, websites
  • Ask questions - answers and linked citations/timestamps
  • Used redis based pub-sub for communication between the backend and frontend
  • Video transcription & translation (any language to English).
  • Chrome extension for usage with websites
  • Optical Character Recognition for PDFs.

Tech Stack

  • NextJS
  • websockets + redis pubsub
  • Weaviate vector DB
  • Flask backend
  • Digital ocean droplets
  • Mongodb
  • AWS s3, lambdas, SQS, SNS

Inspiration:

  • ChatGPT's limitations (like its word limit) were evident
  • Wanted to answer questions about whole text books or long videos
  • Especially useful for students who are hands-on learners and need a less linear journey through their textbook chapters :)

Visuals:

Chimpbase home image Chimpbase image Chimpbase image Chimpbase image

WePyk: November - December 2022

Status: 🚫 Dead, was my next stop to pairing the front-end experience I got building this portfolio site with some of my backend skills

Objective:

Teamed up with a founder to realize his vision of car swapping for travelers. WePyk was our solution to provide travelers an economical alternative to car rentals.

What it was: WePyk was a web application MVP aimed at facilitating car swaps for travelers heading to opposite destinations.

Tech Stack:

  • 🌐 NextJS Client
  • 🎨 Tailwind CSS & Styled Components
  • 🔐 NextAuth (SMTP Magic links or OAuth with Google/Github)
  • ☁️ AWS S3 for file management

Visuals:

WePyk Web App Another View

It would be near embarrasing to list all of the failures that I spent late nights working on before these, so I will refrain from writing about them. However, I've learned so much, and my love for learning everything and anything has only grown. If you are interested in chatting, even just to chat about technology, my socials are on the home page. Looking back, each project, regardless of its outcome, added another chapter to my story of growth and learning in tech.