i'm a 21 year old undergraduate student based in seattle, washington. i'm currently in my final year studying computer science with minors in informatics and music at the university of washington, planning on pursuing a graduate degree studying computer science education. during the school year, i work as a teaching assistant in the paul g. allen school of computer science, and am currently the head teaching assistant for intro to computer programming 1 at the university of washington
04.10.21 | sigcse 2021 post-mortem
SIGCSE 2021 was the first, and, as I move ever closer to graduating this year, seemingly the last academic conference of my college career. I’ve heard faculty members talk about all the issues with the conference, and I get where they’re coming from, but for me, and maybe because it was my first conference, it was amazing; it was a lifeline...
read more11.09.20 | building a new website
at the beginning of every school year, i feel like a different person, creatively, than the year before. so every school year, i redesign my portfolio site to reflect where i'm currently at. being in my senior year and applying to grad schools, i got pretty behind and didn't end up updating it until i got a spur of inspiration and wrote the whole thing this last weekend. so welcome to omar's portfolio 4.0!
as a project for my human-computer interaction class, my group designed and prototyped an app called forager. with the explosion of popularity foraging has gained in recent years, we wanted to make the entire process simpler and lower the barrier of entry for new foragers. forager gives mushroom foragers a smoother and more fulfilling experience. you can read more in our blog post. this project was awarded "overall best design" in our human-computer interaction course.
forager
intro java style linter
an interactive information web app, created for the Client-Side Web Development course in the iSchool at the university of washington. This web app functions as an educational Java linter that checks the style of users' input Java code and inform users of what the style errors are with suggestions on how to fix them. This app is built around the style guidelines for CSE 14X (Intro to computer programming 1 & 2 at the university of washington) with those students as the primary audience, but should be a helpful resource for any novice Java learners.
i created a portfolio site from scratch for my wonderful partner, sophie larsen, a graduate student in mathematics at the university of illinois urbana/champagne
sophie larsen portfolio
cse 142 style guide
i work as a teaching assistant for cse 142 (intro to computer programming 1) at the university of washington. one project i did as a teaching assistant was to improve our introductory java style guide by rewriting it and formatting it as a web document that would be easier to access and read.
check it out!(also reformatted on the course site)
Readycipe was created as a final project for my intro to informatics class to streamline the food-making process and make cooking more accessible for lower-income people working on tighter budgets with less free time for shopping and cooking. We created a prototype of a machine that would facilitate the streamlining of the food-preparation process for users. I created the UI for the machine and the basics of a backend.
note: this project was developed with certain hardware in mind, and it's only made to display well on a portrait computer screen. sorry mobile users!
readycipe
I designed a new, updated website for my hometown mosque. I basically grew up there and their old website was incredibly outdated, so I volunteered to design a new one to update their web presence. It's built on WordPress to allow for easy upkeep, and I implemented a self-updating table of prayer times.
SNAPTrack is an app i helped develop for the dubhacks 2018 hackathon. we created it with the intention to help people who use SNAP benefits by providing them with information to help them make the most of their SNAP benefits. it's taking the place of a now defunct service that informed people about what they could use SNAP benfits on, while also providing more specific services; store and item specific information about where they can use their benefits, what they can use their benefits for, and scraping user receipt data to better flesh out the database of SNAP eligible items/places and locating stores where users can use SNAP benefits. i created the front-end of the project.
the final project for my Technical Foundations of Informatics class, we put together a set of data visualizations and analytics about Seattle and National crime data using R and shinyapps. I implemented the arson data tab as well as styling the entire site.
note: the API for the arson data has changed since this project was done and unfortunately the arson page no longer loads properly as a result of that change
university of washington
undergraduate teaching assistant
03.2018 - presentI teach a quiz section for various courses in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer science (intro to computer programming 1 & 2, programming languages), mostly (and currently) intro to computer programming 1. My job includes teaching quiz section, holding office hours, and grading homework and exams.
head teaching assisstant
09.2020 - presentAs head TA, I schedule and lead meetings with the course staff and course instructors, I advise other teaching assistants, manage and develop course infrastructure, and develop and update the course site
student mentor
06.2020 - 08.2020I taught bi-weekly mentoring sessions for a small group of middle- and high-school students. An 8-week program in which we covered basic skills in web development (HTML, CSS, JS) and data programming (in Python). Students went from learning basic syntax at the beginning of the program to developing their own small projects by the end of the program
stem league
amazon
software development engineer intern
06.2020 - 09.2020I did fullstack development on a new feature for an internal EC2 insight tool. I designed the feature using Sketch and wrote a Java backend that connected to an existing frontend built using React and Redux. I also worked on and added features to said frontend. The project was developed and deployed through AWS
software development intern
06.2019 - 09.2019My work included using Bash and Azure to ensure the security of internal dev environments, using Bash, Python, and AWS to improve automated tasks to help modernize and improve workflow efficiency of engineers, and using jQuery to work on full-stack creation of features for customer troubleshooting. I also started the process of transitioning my team's infrastructure from jQuery to React.
citrix systems
washington river protection solutions
ugrad intern - technical
06.2018 - 08.2020I created near-real-time data visualizations for nuclear waste treatment facilities on the Hanford site using PI Systems and JavaScript. I also built and updated attribute templates for data organization and management on PI Asset Framework servers using R and SQL.
science research intern
09.2016 - 05.2017I maintained and updated mass spectrometry contaminant databases to provide a higher level of precision to mass spectroscopy analysis results. I also worked on debugging, generating test data sets, and testing of new mass spectrometer data analysis application Formularity to ensure reproducible and accurate measurements
pacific northwest national laboratory
i am currently the head ta of cse 142 at the university of washington. i've been a ta in the allen school at the university of washington for 2.5 years, mostly teaching intro programming courses, but i've also taught our programming languages course. i'm really passionate about introductory computer science, equitable cs pedagogy, and equitable cs outreach -- dealing with diversity/inclusion/equity problems in the cs world and cs spaces.
courses
cse 142: intro to computer programming 1
spring '21 - autumn '20 - winter '20 - autumn '19 - spring '19 - autumn '18 - spring '18a course on basic procedural programming, as well as introductory object-oriented programming concepts. i've taught this course for 6 terms as a teaching assistant. in that time, i've lead exploration sessions where we host talks on a wide variety of computing topics for intro students, and served as head ta and hosted class on occassion.
cse 341: programming languages
spring '20the allen school's course on programming languages. it explores a variety of programming language topics by studying functional programming languages, static- and dynamicly-typed languages, and loose- and strict-typed languages, through the lenses of SML, racket, and ruby. i taught this course for one term, and I think it's a super fun exploration into the mechanics of programming languages. if you're a cse student at uw, i highly recommend this class!/p>
cse 143: intro to computer programming 2
winter '19resources
- a code quality guide for cse 142 @ the university of washington that I wrote
- the cs-ed podcast! a set of great dives into cs education topics with some great people in the field, including the university of washington's own dr. amy ko!
schedule a meeting
you can schedule a meeting with me through calendly