Projects

TCP echo server

September 2026

A server that holds several conversations at once: any number of clients can connect, and each one gets back exactly what it sent without waiting behind the others.

It's C++ on raw POSIX sockets, with every connection handed to its own thread. Sends loop until every byte is out, because a single send can write only part of a message. A small command-line client comes with it, and a plain netcat session works just as well.

gerp

Spring 2026

gerp returns every line a word appears on across a whole directory tree, fast enough that the size of the tree stops mattering. It reads each file once at startup and builds an index, so every search after that is a lookup rather than another walk over the disk.

It's written in C++ and leans on nothing outside the standard library. The index is a hash table I built by hand — a vector of sets holding each word, its lowercased form, and pointers back to the line and file it came from — with open addressing for collisions and a rehash whenever the load factor passes 0.7. Keeping the lowercased form beside the original is what lets case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches run off the same structure.

It was the final project for CS15, Tufts' data structures course, last semester, written with Anubhav Sinha. Recursing through the directories was the easy half; the assignment was really about the index, and it was the first thing I'd written where picking the data structure was the whole problem.

TRACE

May 2026

TRACE takes a photo of a meal, flags likely allergens and gives a risk-level warning.

It's a full-stack web app built with Python and Flask, with the Claude Vision API handling the photo analysis. It remembers your allergies, and it's simple enough for a child to use.

I grew up in Taiwan with a nut allergy. As a shy kid, navigating that in a foreign country was hard and I'd often avoid asking about allergens out of embarrassment or fear of getting the question wrong. Unfortunately, that's not unique to being abroad; kids everywhere struggle to speak up for themselves.

Outside of just children, travellers also face issues with allergens when encountering new foods abroad or struggling to communicate in a different language. TRACE helps provide one extra level of comfort by giving you guidance on how likely a food is to have an allergen.