Jeff Taylor-Chang
Who Am I?
Developer + Designer + Musician + Athlete + Mentor
I am a Junior in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over the past several years, I have explored many areas of Computer Science but I keep coming back to mobile and web development. I love creating things that people can see, interact with, and enjoy.
My fascination with CS started at a young age, however the 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 13, I developed a FPS in Java, doing my own 3D modeling, graphics, and music. By 15, I had released my first mobile app. By 17, my second mobile app was used hundreds of thousands of times and would be a staple of my high school for years to come. By 18, I had my first software engineering internship straight out of high school.
I've created my own encryption, a compression algorithm, a pendulum with a solenoid controlled by a microcontroller that shifted its center of mass mid flight to increase its period, multiple successful mobile apps, but I learned early that nothing could compare with the satisfaction of having had a tangible impact on a community. I want to spend my life making things that impact people, fulfilling needs people don't always even know they have.
In the beginning of my senior year of high school, I created OneDay to solve the issue of students
not knowing their schedule. It is now used by thousands of students, parents, and teachers, and has
grown to be far more than a schedule app, including its own social network and homework tracking. The
app has been downloaded nearly 4,000 times and used over 250,000 times since late 2016.
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 was a huge success, and in my senior year I released it on the app stores. It now
has nearly 3,000 downloads.
Nearing the end of high school to the present, I interned at Cognition Corporation working on a mobile app prototype.
Most details about the project aren't disclosable but I led their mobile strategy, bringing a company that specialized
in computer applications to the mobile sphere. I am continuing my work at Cognition, branching out into more areas.
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.
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, trademark pending).
Unlike the majority of my other work, this is fully open-sourced and available on my GitHub account.
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 Optical Character Recognition in Java and
was able to beat it. I moved on to using MITM techniques to intercept HQ's content.
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. No, I do not endorse cheating.
1999-
My Passions:
the list goes on
Despite seeming like all I do is CS, 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. 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.