Just updated my website for the first time in a longgggg time (4 years to be exact!)

Its great how much SEO I've built up on the old one, but I think its long overdue for a fresh coat of paint (and description), so here it goes...

My motto while building this was "make it simple, but surprisingly complex... WIDGETSSS"

I updated basically everything but here are the features I'm most proud about:

- A spotify widget to the bottom left (exposing all my songs)

- A location widget that receives a city & weather update every 4am from my phone

- A notebook widget to check up on my posts (had to add an rss feed for this)

- Lastly a github widget to see my last commit

- I had to finagle a good way to get static & dynamic widgets working because fetching my large RSS feed was taking too long (I eventually settled on fixing it on my notebook side, but I hope Next13 will be compatible with emotion ui soon...)

I'd like to add a couple more widgets in the future (maybe something that interacts with something in my room? DM or email me if you have any ideas) but I'll get to that after college apps

Getting to make something that wasn't super complex after being (very slightly) "burnt-out" due to college apps was super fun.

Updating my website for the first time in 4 years!

It's a crazy time of the decade where it seems like everyone is disagreeing about something (rightfully so in some cases). In light of these differences, it still amazes me how we manage to split the country into only two parties with seemingly infinite sides to infinite problems. With these infinite variations, dividing everything into a clean two usually comes with a lot of nuance, along with tons of compromise & conflicting views for both sides. In reality there should be ideologically many parties, so I set out to see if I could derive any insights from this mathematically. 

First I started off with a public dataset of most of the major US politicians twitter accounts. Once I consolidated all of the identifying usernames, I scraped all of their current tweets in their profile up to around 300. Taking mentions into account, I build a graph where every person was connected with the people they had mentioned in their tweets.

Ending here, this should give us a graph where when visualized shows the "relatedness" of different politicians. The problem here is that it doesn't take into account if the relation is negative or positive (two people could be bitter rivals, or political bros). To do this I took sentiment of the tweets into account, letting that control the weightings of the graph, essentially creating a weighted undirected graph which could be used as a representation of the current political state of the US. This is of course going to not be extremely accurate to the complex relations of the real world, but it should act as a good approximation of outward personas.

With this I was able to use clustering algorithms! This could be used to figure out sub-political parties. The one I ended up settling with was the Louvain Heuristic for clustering because my dataset was relatively large with many connections. With this I let it classify itself into different sub-groupings.

Okay so onto the clickbait-y title... One of the most (or least because I partially predicted it) surprising aspects was it didn't identify just 2 political groups! Looking into the groups, it seemingly put all the politicians in one of 3 groups (which I'll name now)—Left Democrats, Conservative Democrats, and Republicans. The model found that the left wing was indeed divided into two major groupings, with one actively fighting for more extreme legislation, while the other mainly stayed more conservative to the status quo. Republicans on the other hand were mostly sorted into their own group.

This could be attributed to two large reasons: either the Democratic party is outwardly debating issues due to being in the presidential term, or a new more left party is emerging from the Democratic party. The former seems unlikely to me due to relatively equal control of both political parties. This leaves that there seems to be a new party either emerging, or a divide in sentiment.

This splitting of the Democratic party is noticed by most people, further supported by the graph, and is remedied during political elections where people need to band together. The larger problem is for legislation, this isn't solved due to infighting in the Democratic party, while Republicans stay relatively unified. 

So what? Something that could be done is while there are similar numbers of Left Democrats versus Conservative Democrats, Left Democrats get much more mentions and media attention. This could possibly mean a party division would be favorable to garner more support from Conservative Democrats. It would also be helpful to see more formal debates between both types of Democrats to decide the future of the party as a whole, without framing its identity being "anti-Republican". 

Overall this was a fun side project and definitely something I want to try doing more! Implementing data science techniques to real political problems is super cool, and deriving real insights is exciting! I've linked the actual graph visualization so you can take a look at it and hopefully find something interesting. Hopefully you found this insightful!

A cluster analysis of tweet sentiments to find sub-political parties! Hopefully this can help people understand the political landscape a little more & understand humans just a little more.

The Hacker Zephyr, a hackathon on a train, that went across the country, was one of the craziest, and most fun experiences of my life.

The way I ended up finding out about being accepted to the Zephyr was super funny. As soon as pairings were announced for the 2021 National Debate tournament, I hopped onto a call with @max, where he invited me. During the whole time, my partner was beside me, asking tons of questions, and prepping for our upcoming round. At that time, I couldn't have known how much that single call, and train could change my life. And here I am, 2 flights, 4 train rides later, writing about what happened. 

In the past year or so, I've lost contact with what I liked about programming. Entangled in school, assignments, efficiency points, I ended up losing sight of what this all was for me, just a way to make. The Zephyr was unlike any other hackathon, because there was no real competition, but just a collective goal, of making 500 ships (projects) during the entire ride. They were themed around the idea of "building your own internet", where we had a full on intranet setup on the train. This was the perfect setup, for me to build tons of micro-projects, that just spurred my inner maker, especially being surrounded with other excited people like me 24/7.  Meeting people like the Libermans, and people at Vercel, also gave me perspective onto why I do these things, that risks are normal, and what I'm actually working towards whenever I create a project or company, a better world and community.

The Zephyr also gave me the nuance to life I've been searching for in so long. I saw so many different places, and experienced so many new ideas. All of these, combined with everyones perspectives, really gave depth to things I've seen. For example, the simple fact of looking at how people formed connections, and how almost everyone we met was so friendly, really gave me the sense that we're all in this together. Almost every person we met, helped us and had good intentions behind what they did. Along with that, the sheer fact of looking out and seeing the sheer vastness of the desert as soon as you wake up, just gives you the perspective of how small you really are, compared to the Earth.

I've also gotten to bond with my friends so much over this trip. At the start I only knew the other 41 people through interactions on the slack, and mostly online, and now I value them as some of my best friends. I just wanted to let everyone on the train know how thankful I am for ya'll, and that that train ride, truly, was a life changing experience.

For pictures, check out on the ZephyrBook or check out my highlights!

42 people. The worlds longest hackathon (3,502 miles). A life changing adventure.

Have you ever been unfocused at home, or feel depressed? With the pandemic, millions have faced many hardships with their life spiraling out of control. To combat these problems, we developed TARDIS, a neurotech headset that's able to let you take control of your life by monitoring your state of mind using AI and help you stay focused. We allow you to detect what state of mind you're in and gather statistics about your brain, and choose to nudge your mind into another state, like being focused or help with depression. You can learn more about it at the website, and check out the white paper or pitch deck on there!

This year a couple of friends and I founded TARDIS, and applied to the Conrad Challenge, an international innovation competition. Over the past months, we've won the competition, getting first place internationally as well as a diversity award, and made it to the Conrad Summit, where we were able to speak with investors, listen to talks from our peers, and hear feedback from judges! It was an amazing experience, where we got to speak to so many people, and I learned so much more about business than I ever thought I would know!

The summit was a great experience, where I was able to connect with high schoolers and mentors from all around the world and receive feedback on our product and marketing. I can't wait to take this forward in the next few months, trying to secure funding and designing our MVP!

A cool new side project, and my experience submitting it to Conrad Challenge and winning!

Yay! The Contra Costa Science Fair just ended, and I ended up getting 3rd place! I had a ton of fun on my project, and I learned a lot on neural networks, especially generative semi-supervised architectures. Check out the video, or the explanation below to learn more about it!

A little bit about my project is that, Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical parasitic disease that kills millions of people in poor underdeveloped countries. Those that suffer from this disease cannot afford expensive medicines as the R&D cost is too high leading to limited commercial development. The goal of this project is to utilize AI to build an open-source neural network to generate novel molecules for leishmania. Utilizing AI for drug discovery would decrease R&D costs and being open source will allow development or other neglected diseases.

The target chosen was Methionyl-tRNA synthetase, which plays a key role in protein synthesis in the parasite. This target also has a lot of prior structure activity data, which allows for training the model.

The network used was adapted from GENTRL (Generative Tensorial Reinforcement Learning), outlined in Dr. Zhavoronkov's paper, where they used GENTRL to successfully create a novel molecule for DDR1 Kinase. The model uses a variational auto-encoder to determine features in the data, and then uses reinforcement learning to tune the decoder based on pre-trained self-organizing maps. The rewards I used were log P, synthetic accessibility, and log IC50 values. The datasets used were MOSES leads, general ligase, and specific target data.

After training, the model was able to generate promising novel molecules. The final structures had a maximum potency of 93%, and a 2.8 accessibility score, implying significant synthesizability for a bioactive molecule. I showed the final output to an expert discovery chemist, who said the molecules looked feasible to create, and were sufficiently complex to warrant bioactivity.

Woot woot! You can check out my code at the GitHub repository, or download a pdf of my board! I hope to either build on this with testing, or make something even cooler next year!!!

Using neural networks to develop novel molecules to target Leishmaniasis. A documentation of my science fair project!

LeishNN: AI based Drug Discovery for Leishmania

Just a few weeks ago, I started to use typescript a lot more in my projects, trying it out in a multitude of applications. After using it in and out, and trying it on a few projects, I think I've come to a conclusion on whether or not its a good language. But first defining what I think a good language is. A good language needs to be intuitive, easy to use, easy to debug, and reasonably performant. In my experience, typescript seems to check all those boxes.

Starting with my first qualm with javascript that typescript seems to fix is undefined errors. These errors happen ALL THE TIME, if you're a javascript developer, where you either have to log an object to tell its properties, or rely on your memory to spell everything out correctly. Even with that, sometimes the values might not be there, and be very hard to catch, with an object with an undefined key returning undefined. Typescript gives an elegant typing system that seems to mesh really nicely with the javascript ecosystem, and makes knowing the type of every variable very easy. 

The best part I find, is that it allows degrees of flexibility, so that everything doesn't need to be statically typed at all. You can include snippets of JS with TS and have everything mesh really easily. The typing is relatively similar to rust typings with angle brackets, which helps a lot when switching over. Overall the debugging experience is a lot more pleasant, where I find a much larger ratio of code to debugging than before.

The second main reason for loving typescript other than just debugging, is auto complete, which comes from the implications of having types in a language. This is super helpful as it speeds up the need of having to check the documentation time and time again, just to look for that one method that you need. Typescript defines everything very explicitly, so you can look through the methods and properties inside the object with ease, and almost never have to deal with the maze of checking which class you have stored in a variable and determining which methods are available.

Overall, I find typescript quite enjoyable, and can't wait to use it in my next projects! If you want to check out an example of one of my projects I'm writing in typescript, you can take a look at the discord bot I'm building for AngelHacks!

My thoughts on whether or not to use typescript, and if its an all around good language.

Over the past few months the TeachAids team and I been developing a way for children to learn about covid19 easily and have a lot of fun while doing it! The end result was CoviDB 4 Kids. While interning at TeachAids, a team was put together to develop a way to solve the problem that new information was mainly being targeted towards adults, while children were kept in the dark. After brainstorming a few ways to go about it, we settled on a website where kids of all ages could easily watch curated videos on the topic.

After months of development and input from our fabulous designer, the end product was done! Built with Next.js, Theme UI, and Rebass, CoviDB 4 Kids uses a kid friendly UI to teach kids from 3-12 about covid19! It was really fun, and an amazing project to work on, and I got to learn so much about how to think about user experience, as well as developing a website professionally. 

I just wanted to take a second to say a big thank you to everyone I worked with there, as its always been fun to work with them and talk with them on our calls!

My story on how I helped TeachAids in developing CoviDB 4 Kids,  a COVID-19 (a new coronavirus) educational resource database for kids!

This summer, I helped start and organize the Summer of Making! 

A little bit on what happened
> In 1967, 100,000 people gathered in San Francisco for the Summer of Love. In 2020, we at Hack Club hosted the Summer of Making. It wasn't an event or a program. It was a theme for the summer and a challenge for students to take on. It was also a summer like no other, with hackers around the world stuck at home. To support makers, we distributed $50,000, [thanks to GitHub](https://github.blog/2020-05-28-introducing-hack-clubs-summer-of-making/), in free electronics (thanks GitHub!) & built Snapchat streaks for coding—but really Summer of Making was about the makers. We left it them to get hacking & they built some pretty awesome things…  
(excerpt taken from [the main website](https://summer.hackclub.com), check it out for more statistics and details)

While organizing it, I learned so many things about how much effort goes into organizing an event at this scale, and especially the reliability needed! It was an amazing experience, where I got to build out different workflows that needed to not only be functional, but scalable to a large distribution. It was definitely hard, but it was gratifying in a way I didn't know was possible. Especially looking at all the applications that came in for hardware, I was able to fully appreciate the breadth of what highschoolers and makers can actually get to doing, when serious!  

This also just emphasized something that I've been thinking about for a while. The fact that programming/organizing/fundraising can actually be used to create a real difference in peoples lives, and impact them. For example, we managed to fundraise 50k, and ship hardware to almost 28 countries! Thats crazy for me to even think about, and the fact that people came into the community and helped with so much more. Not only that, but we started the creation of [scrapbook, a type of status update system for Hack Clubbers to give status updates](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com), which is such a big part of the community now, with over 5.5k posts/projects!  

During a hard time like the pandemic, where people felt the hardest blow in inspiration and making, I'm glad I was able to make a difference and hopefully get more people into the cult of creating.

This summer, I helped organize the Summer of Making, with Hack Club!

&nbsp;A few weeks ago, I got accepted into an internship program for [TeachAids](https://teachaids.org/)! So far, its been an amazing experience where I get to work with many people and develop my skills! I've leared so much since I've started, from editing videos (with premiere!), to learning how to use the twitter and google drive API's ( the latter sucks :\\ ). Its also one of the things that I've been wanting to do for a long time, because I usually develop projects solo, and I want to get the feel of working as a team to create a finished product!

&nbsp;So far, I'm planning on doing a full time summer internship, and to check out the things I'm working on, look at [CoviDB](https://covidb.org), a great way to research on covid-19, the [speaker series](https://covidb.org/Video), and stay tuned for Story Wall, a great way for people to share their concussion stories!

A fun internship where I'm working on many cool things, and learning about new technologies!

After working with Go for a while, I decided to hunker down and write a production level CLI for fun. Lo and behold came templater. Templater is a really cool CLI for storing, loading, and creating code templates. Its as easy as 

and then you have created a template! Then with simple GitHub OAuth, you can upload the template easily, and view it on the website at https://tmpltr.now.sh or just download it through the CLI. The best part is that when uploading, it saves the file structure and README.md, so that you can check out some basics of what it is before you download it. Another thing I tried to do with this project is proper git etiquette (PR's, Versions, Badges, Unit Tests etc.) and it turned out pretty great, where I learned a bit about shields, and how to configure GitHub actions. Check out the GitHub at https://github.com/neelr/templater and be sure to leave a star! Also, please try out the CLI easily with

1. `go get github.com/neelr/templater/cmd/plate`
2. `go install github.com/neelr/templater/cmd/plate`

A fast, easy way to organize and share code templates.

#programming

MyWebsite 2.0

The Hidden Political Party

The Hacker Zephyr.

TARDIS - The Conrad Challenge

LeishNN: AI based Drug Discovery for Leishmania

TypeScript: Yay or Nay?

CoviDB 4 Kids

Summer of Making

Starting at CoviDB & TeachAids

Templater

.css-4cffwv{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}#programming

MyWebsite 2.0

The Hidden Political Party

The Hacker Zephyr.

TARDIS - The Conrad Challenge

LeishNN: AI based Drug Discovery for Leishmania

TypeScript: Yay or Nay?

CoviDB 4 Kids

Summer of Making

Starting at CoviDB & TeachAids

Templater

#programming