23 years old, freshly graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Computer Science (secondary in Statistics, magna cum laude, Class of 2026). I write Swift and Kotlin, care a little too much about scroll performance, and I'm currently shipping my first three apps to the App Store.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon, taught myself Swift at fifteen because I wanted a better anime tracker than the one on my phone, and never really stopped. Six years later that same itch turned into my first real App Store release.
Cambridge, Massachusetts (GMT−5) — originally Portland, Oregon. Coffee-adjacent, keyboard-loud, happiest somewhere between Instruments and Figma.
Harvard College, 2022 – 2026
A.B. Computer Science, secondary field in Statistics. GPA 3.87 / 4.0, magna cum laude,
Phi Beta Kappa (senior elections).
Small scopes, real devices, honest metrics. I prototype in Figma for a day, build a vertical slice in a week, then hand it to five people who have never seen it and watch where they hesitate.
I don't ship a screen until it holds 60 fps on a five-year-old Android mid-ranger, because that's what most of my users actually carry.
Bouldering at MetroRock twice a week, competitive Free Fire squad on weekends (which is exactly how GemDrop started), and a very slow-moving side project to translate my grandmother's recipe notebook from Portuguese.
Languages: English (native), Portuguese (fluent), Japanese (JLPT N3, studying).
All three are built solo — design, code, backend and store listing. Written in Swift/SwiftUI for iOS with a shared Kotlin Multiplatform data layer for the Android builds.
In App Review
A calm, ad-light home for anime fans: track what you're watching across seasons, get an airing schedule in your own timezone, and pick up an episode on whichever device is closest. Offline-first library, per-series notification rules, and a "no spoilers" mode that blurs thumbnails of unwatched episodes.
Submitted · Oct 2026
Answers one question well: what should I watch tonight? You give it two minutes of taste calibration, it gives you five films — with a one-line reason for each pick, where to stream it in your country, and a runtime filter for the nights you only have ninety minutes. Group mode merges two watchlists and finds the overlap.
Closed Beta
A rewards app for Free Fire players: earn points through daily quizzes, sponsored offers and tournament predictions, then redeem them for diamond top-up codes delivered by our partner reseller. No account credentials are ever requested — redemption happens through the official in-game code flow.
A note on GemDrop: the app is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Garena or Free Fire. Rewards come from advertiser budgets and partner resellers, never from generators, hacks or account access. If an app ever asks for your Free Fire password, close it — mine never will.
Nothing dramatic — a lot of small projects, a few good mentors, and one very stubborn habit of finishing what I start.
Valedictorian shortlist · AP Computer Science A (5) · Robotics club captain
Built Kuro, a scrappy anime watchlist app for me and eleven friends. It was ugly, it synced over a Google Sheet, and it taught me more than any tutorial did.
Remote · 4 clients
Two small business apps and a scheduling tool for a Portland climbing gym. First time being paid to care about someone else's edge cases.
A.B. Computer Science, secondary in Statistics
Coursework across systems, machine learning, HCI and probability. Member of Harvard Computer Society; mobile lead for HackHarvard 2024 and 2025.
Harvard SEAS · 6 semesters
Ran weekly sections, graded ~480 students across three years, and rewrote the Swift track's networking problem set after too many office-hours questions about the same crash.
Northline Media — Boston, MA
Owned the offline-download queue for their iOS streaming client. Cut failed downloads on flaky networks by 41% by moving to a resumable chunked transfer with a proper retry ladder.
Harvard SEAS — Interactive Systems Group
On-device recommendation under tight memory budgets. Co-authored a poster accepted at the CHI 2025 Late-Breaking Work track.
Fable Health — New York, NY
Shipped an accessibility overhaul of the patient app: VoiceOver rotor support, dynamic type down to the smallest layouts, and a contrast audit that closed 63 WCAG violations. Received a return offer.
Cambridge, MA
Deferred the return offer for twelve months to ship JKAnime, Reelo and GemDrop independently. Funded by freelance iOS contracts two days a week.
The ones that changed how I build things. Code for most of these is on GitHub; the thesis artifact is available on request.
Trained a 4.1 MB quantized two-tower model that ranks a 180k-title catalog entirely on-device, so no watch history ever leaves the phone. Beat the cloud baseline on cold-start users by 8.4% NDCG@10 while holding p95 inference at 34 ms on an iPhone 12.
Implemented a single-node column store in C with a B-tree secondary index, zone maps, shared scans and a hash-join operator. Placed 4th of 71 on the course leaderboard for the final benchmark suite.
A semester-long design study with six low-vision participants. Shipped as a campus web app that surfaces quiet, well-lit study spots with live occupancy; ran two rounds of usability testing and a full WCAG 2.2 AA audit.
Analysed 3,400 series from 2010–2024 to model which factors predict a second season. Studio track record and week-4 retention mattered far more than premiere-week ratings — the finding that shaped JKAnime's discovery feed.
A replicated key–value store with a Raft consensus layer and a CRDT merge path for offline clients. The conflict-resolution design ended up almost verbatim in JKAnime's cross-device watch state.
Newman, S., & Almeida, D. (2025). Trust and legibility in on-device recommenders: a study of "why am I seeing this?" explanations. Extended Abstracts of CHI '25, Yokohama, Japan.
1st place, Mobile track — Sublet, a 36-hour housing-swap app for study-abroad students.
Awarded 2024 for academic distinction in the sophomore year.
Harvard Program for Research in Science & Engineering, summer 2023 cohort.
Roughly in order of how much of my life each one has consumed.
Freelance iOS/Android contracts, TestFlight invites for the three apps, or just a question about the thesis — all welcome. I answer within two business days.
