After I completed my JRA project, Time is Money, I decided to feed my entrepreneurial drive during the rest of summer and worked with Sussex’s Entreprenurship Team to spend 100 hours with a founding duo fresh out of their incubation program. The idea of Groov was straightforward, a modern day jukebox app built to drive social interactions with music, users would pay to play music in the current venue they are at to share the music they love, with additional partnerships with commercial music providers to drive revenue.

Groov Logo and a Tagline as displayed in the Groov Pitchdeck.

As a developer, my tasks for Groov was to bring the proof of concept to life. However, there was a spanner thrown in the works as there was no wireframe and the duo were still figuring out the brand identity. Knowing this, we decided to rewind a bit and have a meeting to consolidate our vision for the proof of concept’s look and feel, I put forward the idea of using an interface design tool such as Figma, and from there the decision was made for me to take the lead on completing the wireframe for a mobile view, with collaboration from the founding duo coming later on down the line. The takeaway from this task was two fold, firstly I had learnt that not having a technical founder meant communication needed to be crystal clear. Secondly, early startups mean you get to really have an impact on the future of the brand, learning a multitude of different skills beyond coding, at the cost of wearing many hats and having a heavy workload.

Lastly, I designed a prototype of the wireframe as a web app with minimal functionality. With an extensive requirements list and a dream, we had no time to waste. Progress accelerated quickly largely due to React’s components system, allowing for reusable and modular sections of code to generate UI. However, the founding duo did not manage to secure the required API keys for the system. To compensate, we had another meeting to scale back the requirements, to pivot for a functional-looking wireframe to showcase to potential investors. Although I wasn’t fully satisfied with the personal progress made throughout the project, I learnt about the importance of communication and reinforced the skill of learning fast, taking joy in the fast-paced feeling of startup culture. I wish the best of luck to Groov moving forwards; music can cultivate culture!

Trading Copier Thumbnail

The Telegram Trading copier was a project built using Python, where trading signals were extracted from various Telegram channels using the Telegram API, and translated into real trades with a take profit and stop loss, sending the packet of information to a broker with an API call, making a market or limit order.

It then keeps track of every trade using an SQL database and decides the next correct state for each trade using a websocket of streaming tick data, processing information for every tick for all instruments that currently have a pending order or open position using REST and Streaming APIs. Includes over 10000 lines of code and upwards of 10 active Telegram channels.I’ve also built a framework for this project to backtest signals using 5s historical candle data.

This served as my introduction to computational finance and was pivotal towards reinforcing a test-driven development mindset. Real trades mean real wins, as well as real losses. Extensive testing saved a considerable amount of potentially lost money by catching bugs in the code.

Front-end User Interface live demo snapshot

During Imperial’s Hackathon, I teamed up with 5 others to take on Terra API’s wearable challenge, where the goal was the most innovative hack using health data. After some brainstorming of ideas, we came up with the objective of monitoring recovery after physical surgery. My contribution to the project was simulating physiological responses with Monte Carlo methods in Python. Since only the heartrate data could be streamed with the wearable device we were given, I decided to simulate some data to to mimic real-world events. The vitals states change in response to probabilistic rules based on its current state, a stochastic process similar to Markov Chains. Essentialy using logic zones with core health metrics, we were able to generate realistic occurences of what a recovery patients vitals may look like, and warning medical professionals such as doctors and nurses if the patient’s vitals reached critical logic zones. The maths for the transition equation from state to state can be defined as below.

Monte Carlo Simulation akin to Markov Chain

This was then integrated into the system, and a score of the patients health was calculated, sending a notification to the medical professional to prompt an appropriate response with Twilio. A key takeaway from the hackathon was the importance of scaling scope through effective communication; as great achievements are possible only when everyone is aligned. Not all members of our team had a technical background, so building the bridge of communication between the technical and non-technical side was crucial to getting our project over the line, and a good learning experience. The full system overview can be seen as below.

High-Level System Design Diagram

Study Quest Thumbnail

Study Quest was a project that blends the excitement of Kahoot! with the adventurous spirit of Dragon Quest. The aim was to create a more engaging learning environment by incorporating quiz sets, which can be created by either students or teachers, into a gamified setting.

My responsibilities included developing community engagement and user generated content features for the app, creating a forum using PHP7 for user interactions, where users could communicate and admins could post blog entries. I also implemented a MySQL database for managing and storing quiz sets, blog posts, and forum discussions for users to share their quiz sets. By the end, I had created a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) web app using PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, embedding the game as a Unity WebGL project.

We placed 2nd Place for ‘Best University Team’ and 3rd Place in the ‘Better Learning’ Category. The experience of a remote hackathon was unique, as you’re not surrounded by other hackers and sleeping on a couch. Nevertheless, the experience was invaluable.

The Level-Up Society Hack hosted by ShowCode | View Devpost | View GitHub Repo