Given that Captora had fewer than 40 employees, I often helped the Sales team accelerate deals (both prospects & renewals), and also coded multiple programs to analyze customer data and provide on-going ROI reports. I also managed several aspects of the Product Marketing process, with regard to Go-To-Market launches, employee & client trainings, webinars, social media management, content blogs, and more.
In addition, I was heavily involved in hackathons throughout my time at Columbia. I went to 20+ hackathons, mostly in the NYC area, but I probably had the most fun when I traveled to UPenn and Yale for their mega hackathons (1000+ hackers). I tend to learn the most by diving directly into new things, and that's why I always enjoyed hackathons so much. They provide a great learning environment with hundreds of other students and mentors who love working with similar technologies. I met students, startups, and mentors from all over the world, coded on new platforms and APIs that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise, and generally had a ton of fun at these events. Several of my friends have successfully launched companies as a result of products they've developed at hackathons, and I hope to be inspired to do the same someday. Some of my hackathon projects can be found below in the Projects section.
Android app that lets you take pictures of classical sheet music, and will tell you the piece's title and composer. Uses various computer vision methods to process the pictures from various angles and levels of noise. SheetSnap was the final project for my Computer Vision & Machine Learning on Mobile Platforms seminar at Columbia, taught by Professor Peter Belhumeur.
Teammates: Robert Ying, Andrew Mercer-Taylor
Presentation
and
Report
An "air violin" that you can play using an Android phone and a Pebble watch. Pebblin' won for the best use of Philips hue technology, and was also a finalist for best Pebble hack. We submitted Pebblin' to a separate contest held by Pebble, and we were voted as a top 16 app among hundreds of apps in Pebble's store.
Teammates: Kevin Heh, Alexander Lin, Robert Ying
Video and Code
Chrome extension that extends the when2meet utility by automatically importing events from your event calendars. Hacked together at Devfest with a few friends in a few hours (this hackathon was hosted by ADI, which we're all members of, so we were definitely multitasking throughout the night). Ended up winning Venmo's "Makes life so Easy" prize. Full details at our website.
Teammates: Derek He, Parthiban Loganathan, Robert Ying, Justin Zhao
Built a Simple Presentation Web Page Generator as the final project in Columbia's compilers class. This was my first foray into functional programming, as we were required to use Ocaml for this project. This language ended up being an easy way to programmatically design slideshows and presentations, as it compiles down to HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Teammates: Richard Chiou, Aftab Khan, Yunhe (John) Wang, Lauren Zou
Resources: Code, Presentation (created through SPWAG!), and Report
Built at Yale's mega-hackathon, VisionAlpha is an Android app that lets you take pictures of handwritten equations, processes the images using Canny edge detection and Hough transforms in order to identify the appropriate elements, and then feeds the information through the Mathematica API to give you the information you're looking for.
Teammates: Brian Wu, Robert Ying, Justin Zhao
Presentation [PDF, Web Slideshow]
A chrome extension that adds a 'blame' button to GitHub, allowing you to penalize your colleagues by fining them through the Venmo API. Scraped together in the last few hours at PennApps after our original ideas fizzled out - in the end, this is just a fun way to increase code accountability among your friends. Finalist for Venmo API prize, and a personal favorite of Venmo's founder, Kortina!
Teammates: Xingzhou (Derek) He, Parthiban Loganathan, Kaiven Zhou
Code
A chrome extension that dynamically translates random words on any webpage into whatever language you want to learn. Depending on your difficulty settings, it will change single words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. Hovering over and clicking the foreign words will produce definitions and will have the computer speak out the word's pronunciation in the correct accent. This hack won 1st place at Facebook's summer hackathon.
Teammates: Parthiban Loganathan, Bob Ren, Kaiven Zhou
Code