derick pascual

I'm currently working with ylab, a Rice University computational biology lab, to build a web app allowing researchers to run gene set comparisons on the web.

ANDES is a gene set comparison methodology that uses gene embeddings to calculate a similarity score between two gene sets. This has important applications in drug development and disease research.

The goal of this app is to provide researchers a way to conveniently upload gene sets, run the ANDES tool, and visualize the results.

I used v0 to prototype and get inspiration for the frontend, and I'm currently building it with Next.js.

On the backend side, I'm using Django to handle REST functionality, and Celery/Redis in order to run asynchronous ANDES computation tasks.

I created a web app that scrapes Rice University servery (dining hall) menus and texts them to users using Twilio API.

For Rice students, part of daily life is checking servery menus to get an idea of where to eat for lunch and dinner. This can take a few minutes, and it's a bit inconvenient to go to the servery websites. I decided to make an app that makes solves this inconvenience.

Using Express.js and Puppeteer, I scraped the Rice menu websites every morning, stored them in a PostgreSQL database, and texted them to users before lunch and dinner using Twilio API.

This was one of my favorite projects! At one point I had over a hundred students receiving menu texts. Unfortunately, the Twilio costs got too high, and since I didn't want to monetize, I decided to shut down the app 🥲.

My friend had an idea for a "Tinder for restaurants" app that would let you swipe on restaurants to decide where to eat. I decided to build it as a learning experience!

I used React for the frontend, and Express.js for the backend.

On the frontend, I used react-tinder-card for the card-swiping functionality. This was my first time using external component libraries, so there was definitely a learning curve. I had to make lots of optimizations to ensure the smoothness of the swiping animation (virtualization, lazy loading, image resolutions).

How the backend worked: I fetched local restaurant data using Google Places API and used socket.io to create "rooms" where multiple users could swipe on the same restaurants in real-time. When a match was found, users would be alerted.

I thought about trying to attract a user-base for this app, but I think the Google Places API costs would've been too high. On top of that, the goal of this app was primarily to familiarize myself with React, Express, and web sockets, which I definitely got to do.

I saw a couple sites on reddit with very distinct aesthetics: countdowns.live and buildspace.so. I wanted to try to make a pomodoro timer with a similar aesthetic.

This was my first time using React to build a user interface. This project was my first introduction to concepts like state, components, and hooks.

For simplicity, I used Firebase for user-related functionality, like auth and storing user data related to time spent working.

I'm a pretty visual person, so this project was very enjoyable to build!