Jeff Taylor-Chang
Who Am I?
The journey started when I was 10
My fascination with CS started at a young age, however the small Massachusetts school
district I grew up in didn't offer programming classes so I taught
myself, waking up early to read textbooks before school and
staying up late after finishing my homework scouring the internet.
By 10, I started writing code for robots in RobotC. By 12, I was writing quiz applications in Ruby to help practice for exams. By 13, I
developed an FPS in Java with LWJGL, doing my own 3D modeling, graphics, and
music. By 15, I had released my first mobile app, a 3D game I built in Unity. By 17, my second
mobile app was used hundreds of thousands of times and would be a
staple of my high school for over 4 years and counting. By 18, I
had my first software engineering internship senior year of high
school and worked as a summer camp robotics teacher for middle school students. My freshmen year of college, I won 2nd place at 54.io with a parking app like Airbnb but for parking.
My sophomore summer, I worked at a Series E startup called 128 Technology designing a
mobile app for managing distributed networks as well as helping rebuild their desktop interface, they've since been acquired by Juniper Networks.
Junior year, we won 2nd place HackIllinois 2020 with an ML-based event recommendation system for the University of Illinois.
That year I also built a fraternity management software suite including a PWA, mobile app, desktop site, and AWS Lambda based backend for my fraternity Kappa Theta Tau.
The summer of Junior year, I interned at Amazon on the Kiva Picking Optimization team
which plans and assigns picking work for hundreds of Amazon Robotic Fulfillment Centers worldwide. Senior year, I co-lead an IoT research group under Professor Caesar.
I also built Actually Colab as a research project with my former roommate and we won 1st place at HackIllinois 2021.
In 2021, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science with focus areas in both "Intelligence and Big Data" and "Human and Social Impact".
After graduation, I moved to Seattle and rejoined the Kiva Picking Optimization team at Amazon where I am now an SDEII.
During my Senior year of college, I worked with my old roommate Bailey Tincher to build a real-time collaborative jupyter editor that is cloud based and free. We adopted a different architecture than the existing tools on the market by creating a distributed network of kernels rather than a centralized server. This allows us to have very low overhead and costs. We worked on it during Hack Illinois 2021, you can read our devpost for more.
During my Junior and Senior years of college, I was the Web Chair
of the Kappa chapter of Theta Tau. During my time on exec, I
noticed how difficult it was to keep track of all the brothers,
events, and attendance. I decided to change that. I created a
system called Kappa which is an iOS and Android app and a desktop
site which automatically tracks events and allows users to check
in or request excuses. Furthermore it is capable of running voting
sessions and allows us to select our pledge classes straight from
the app.
My roommate Bailey told me he had a great idea: we would write
code for 36 hours straight to develop a service that would read a
student's resume and automatically match them with events each
week happening on campus they would be most interested in. He
would handle the backend architecture with the help of another
member, our friend Jackie would handle the machine learning side
for matching members to meetings, and I would develop an interface
to manage events and make the various requests to match them with
users. We entered HackIllinois 2020 as one of 250 teams and worked
all night until just an hour before judging. After the judging had
ended, one of the staff pulled us aside and said to head to the
front of the audience at the award ceremony. We had won 2nd place.
At the beginning of my 2nd semester at University of Illinois, I
was introduced to the trivia game HQ. A few days later I had built
an application that used OCR in Java and was able to beat it in 4
hours while laying in bed. I moved on to using MITM techniques to
intercept HQ's web socket. The first version of HolmesQ was built
in a single day as an experiment, eventually becoming a
full-fledged bot capable of detecting live games and crawling the
internet to calculate the probability of each answer. The bot has
won nearly 50 trivia games. The bot was written in C++, C#, and
Swift with the ability to connect to the original Java OCR method.
As the final part of a CS course in my freshman year of college,
we had the option to create whatever project we would like. I
developed an encryption that was not only locked by a private key,
but also immune to Statistical Frequency Analysis (or as I like to
call it, The Scrabble Method). This is fully open-sourced and
available on my GitHub account but it represents some of my
earliest work in college.
In my few couple months at UIUC, I applied and was accepted to the
54hr Startup Competition. I spent the entire weekend working with
my team CurbSpot and I developed the functional CurbSpot prototype
in 3 straight days of work. We demoed the app to the judges from
companies like Capital One, and walked away with 2nd place in the
finals and a grant to continue our work. We later were invited to
present at ThinkChicago.
In the beginning of my senior year of high school, I created
OneDay to solve the issue of students not knowing their schedule.
It was used by thousands of students, parents, and teachers,
and grew to be far more than a schedule app in the 4 years it was the defacto scheduling tool.
The app has been downloaded over 4,000 times and used over 300,000 times since late
2018.
In my sophomore year of high school, I was given a project to
create something, anything, with CS in a few short weeks. This was
the birth of Skyscraper, as I debuted the 3D isometric game
letting the class play it on phones. It now has nearly 3,000
downloads.
1999-
My Passions:
the list goes on
Despite seeming like all I do is write code, I have a lot more up
my sleeve. In High School, I was a Varsity sprinter, and trained
all the way to a 3rd degree blackbelt in Uechi-Ryu starting in
pre-school. I was also an accomplished pianist of over 10 years,
and a modestly talented 3D artist, doing all my own art for my
apps and games. Other things about me include that I love to watch
movies, especially from the horror genre, and, in case it wasn't
clear, I love making mobile apps.