Cole Harper

This was a project that I worked on for an iOS class at the University of Texas. We were required to construct the application from the ground up. The objective was to develop a habit tracking application that utilized virtual animals to provide incentives for building positive habits through interactions with the virtual animals. We developed this application over the course of a semester. We utilized UIKit and SwiftUI for the user interface and CoreData for persistent data storage. Additionally, we employed SpriteKit for rendering the animals. Overall, this project provided an enriching learning experience.

Advent of Code is a series of programming challenges that serve as a virtual advent calendar leading up to Christmas. This year, I participated in the challenge and successfully completed all the problems. It presented a stimulating and diverse range of computer science questions, making it an enjoyable experience. Day 5 stood out for me as it provided an opportunity to implement algorithms that I had long desired to explore. I completed all of the challenges in Go, however next year I am planning on tackling them in either Rust or Swift. I highly recommend participating in the challenge next year.

I created this website as a personal project to display my portfolio and learn how to build a complete application. As you can probably guess, I’m not a front-end developer. I’ve gained a newfound respect for them! This website has taken longer than I’d like to admit to get working! But it’s been a great experience! The front-end is built with Svelte and Tailwind, the backend is written in Rust using Axum, and I have PostgresSQL as the database that stores the project and hobby data to dynamically service the frontend with data. These services are Dockerized and running on a Digital Ocean Droplet with a SWAG (Secure Web Application Gateway) container managing all the networking. I wanted to be able to experience the full flow of architecting, coding, and testing a small project, and I’ve learned a ton along the way! This website is still a work in progress, but I’m happy to share it with you! I plan to keep iterating on it and eventually make the GitHub repo public.

I created a small private Discord bot that would send memes and other inside jokes when someone in the server sent a message that contained a keyword. Modes could be turned off and on, new keywords added, all live from Discord. This project was exceptionally fun to do, but it was done using the Discord.py library, which I felt was difficult to use. I have since decommissioned the project, but I have plans to create a new Discord bot written in Go instead.

This was a TAMU 2020 Hackathon project where I was on a team of 4 that came up with a proof of concept of a website that provides drivers with an easy-to-use, interactive map, depicting all possible roads considered hazardous in a given area. Based on previous crash data, our website provides predictions of what percent of the time a certain road will be considered "dangerous". Since all the information on our website is neatly presented and easy to understand, users are able to make more informed decisions about what route is safest to travel given certain conditions. The predictions were provided by a Microsoft Azure model.

This was a 2020 HackTexas Hackathon project where we developed True Colors, which reveals the parent company and its associated ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings, enabling users to uncover potentially hostile companies behind everyday goods. By removing an enormous barrier to voting with your wallet, this smooths the path to backing companies providing for more social good. ESG ratings calculated by several different firms track everything from pollution and waste to product liability and human capital, as well as corporate behavior. The app was written in React, Node.js, and SQLite.