Hi, my name is Jason and I have been programming for a while.
I've worked on a lot of fun and interesting projects, as you will see if you read on, and have now graduated from Penn State University ↗! If my experience sounds like something you are hiring for or know someone who is hiring for, please contact Jason ↗!
Since way back in senior year of highschool, when I decided I would learn JavaScript to make a minecraft bot ↗. Then I learned TypeScript so I could make APIs ↗ for myself and others. Around the same time I also started learning Java because if you're already making minecraft bots you may as well start making minecraft mods ↗ and contributing to Java tools ↗ for JavaScript minecraft bots. Since then, I learned Kotlin, which is the TypeScript to JavaScript in the Java world, and continued making minecraft mods ↗ and minecraft plugins ↗. Around this time, I took a look around the programming landscape and tried out Gleam, which is a growing programming language that compiles to Erlang, or in my use case JavaScript, for more minecraft mods ↗.
After that, I started looking into other things which I found interesting, like data presentation formats and databases and stumbled upon Trustfall. Trustfall is, according to the github README, "A query engine for any combination of data sources. Query your files and APIs as if they were databases!". And that's what I did for a while, until I wanted to expand the project even more, being a programmer myself, I created a github adapter ↗ and contributed back to the original project ↗ under the guidance of the extremely patient and helpful maintainer.
Later, I took my Rust knowledge on the road when I got interested in learning about linters and a brand new project at that time, OXC, which describes itself as, "A collection of high-performance JavaScript tools.". I found this premise interesting, and I also found Rust to be a great language for new contributors to a project, so I spent a good amount of time contributing to this project too ↗.
MidnightSky is a startup game company (2 developers, 3 administrative staff) that runs a Minecraft Server with ~75 concurrent players (at all times of the day) and several thousand monthly active users where I lead feature development from July to October 2025.
The tech stack was a large (50K LOC+) Kotlin and Java project that stored data in a MongoDB database and eventually PostHog.
I designed several large new features from the design stage all the way to the implementation stage along with support from administrative staff. Then, we launched a new "season" (3 month period in which everyone starts the game from scratch with whatever new features came in the new update).
Did you do anything else?
Funny that you ask, yes I in fact did. Once we released a new season of the game, I quickly learned we had zero analytics about how users were interacting with both existing features, and the new features I had created. This made it hard to know whether any of the thousands of magic numbers the game had needed to be tweaked.
What did you do about the lack of analytics?
I designed and implemented an interface for events to be sent from Kotlin to PostHog to allow for data-based decision making for all of the game staff. This addition started from neither me nor anybody else on the team knowing anything about analytics, to the first event, to the first graph, to leading a seminar amongst the team how to make more graphs, to eventually having the ability for any member of the team being able to make a graph for what they were looking to monitor without even needing to loop in a developer. All in all, a success much larger than I could have imagined at the outset.
Dataset AI is a startup AI company (3 engineers) where I worked as a Software Engineer from January to May 2025.
The tech stack was a (5K LOC+) React frontend, a (10K LOC+) Python backend and data stored within Google Cloud's Firebase database.
I collaborated with a team of 3 to build a web app which supported an excel-like editor which allowed for the user to speak to multiple AI model conversations in parallel. The main use case for this was comparing a fine-tuned model with a base model across many different prompts at once.
Anything else you would like to mention?
Yeah, I also learned how and then optimized a React app that had gotten slow using industry tools like react-scan, resulting in bringing the experience back to usable for the webapp.
Is that the only project you worked on?
No, later into this position I was reassigned to work on a different team within the parent company which maintained a (10K LOC+) React Native AI chat bot supporting Web, iOS, and Android for about 1 million monthly active users
What's Vue Technology LLC?
Vue Technology LLC is the company that sponsors Vue development (and works closely with ByteDance, the company which owns TikTok) where I did a Software Engineer Internship from December 2022 to January 2023.
The tech stack that I worked on was an open source Rust project.
I implemented an algorithm called a call-flow graph to an open source project called oxc which enabled saving significant bandwidth when communicating between website and client code. These improvements were contributed to a Rust application that has 2 million weekly downloads on npm, it's called oxlint ↗.
Was the work open source?
Yeah it was, you can take a look at some of the work in the PR here ↗, the work was later merged within this PR ↗.
Cerium is an AI chat application I worked on to learn AI model API's and the data structure of a typical AI chat app.
The frontend was a SwiftUI iOS native app. The backend was a TypeScript API through Convex (a serverless function provider similar to AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Workers). The database was Convex's builtin document store (like MongoDB).
I designed and implemented a SwiftUI mobile app similar to the ChatGPT mobile app.
Can I see it on the iOS App Store?
