Apple

For my computer science senior capstone project sponsored by Apple, my team made an app in Swift to help people setup Mac clusters for machine learning. A cluster is a group of computers (for this use case only Mac's) that combine their computing power to do a task like AI training. Before the creation of our project, the process of setting up a cluster was tedious, needing 2 seperate command line scripts that had little debugging information if something went wrong. Our project aimed to provide a polished UI, following Apple's aesthetic, that also provided information to help users.

I worked on the UI of the app. With help from our groups company contact, Cori, I developed a UI that stayed true to the look of other Apple apps. Some parts were easy, like having SwiftUI default to Apple's color and sizing schemas. But some parts were hard, like providing a completely new UI for device discovery. Previous Apple products, like AirDrop and AirPod discovery, worked in this domain, but they were no help in making a UI that had to be detailed and compatible for multi device discovery. After a month of prototyping, I created the SnapCarousel component. More detail on it can be found under my portfolio page.

The resulting app was a success. Not only did our app win an award for being the best technical project, the SnapCarousel component got praised a lot. I had multiple Apple engineers single out the component as one of their favorite parts and other industry professionals confused it as a built-in swift component. Though I started this project hoping to use my experience in high performance computing to help build a great technical app, I really fell in love with design and have been focusing on improving my skills ever since.