Blurring one face is easy. Blurring dozens of faces, in dozens of photos, multiple times per week, is a tedious time-suck, even when using professional software like Photoshop. But that's exactly what journalists and activists have to do when covering protests.

Blurryface solves this problem by providing an easy, fast, and optionally machine learning-assisted way to blur photos.

I built Blurryface using Vanilla Javascript and bundled for MacOS and Windows using Tauri, and integrated an on-device machine learning model for recognizing faces for automatic blurring using the RetinaFace CNN model. It's since been used by journalists and organizers in a variety of social movements.

You can download and try out Blurryface yourself at blurryface.szh.land.

As a freelance fullstack engineer, I used React Native and Flask to build a hybrid work scheduling app in one month that was used for a pilot in a real workplace with more than 40 people.

I collabored with a designer, who provided Figma mockups for iOS interfaces that I adapted into frontend code for cross-platform mobile and web, and a data engineer, who wrote scheduling algorithms that I converted into a backend API.

I became involved in this project after meeting Royal Bank of Canada Director of Distribution Strategy Michelle Yu at a virtual conference in 2021. She was testing a startup idea with a former co-worker, and needed a confident fullstack developer to take lead on building a minimum viable product.

With my React Native skills and general fullstack experience, I was the team member she needed.

How do you demonstrate your mastery and hold yourself accountable when self-learning topics outside of school?

During my gap year, learning in public was my answer: publishing blog posts, YouTube videos, and other content as I learned about everything from web development to electrical engineering.

Postulate is a platform dedicated to facitating this public learning system. It includes a full-featured rich text editor built from scratch, with what I still believe to the best inline LaTeX UX I've experienced of any general rich text editor. It includes comments and social features. Best of all, it includes a GitHub-like contribution grid to track your progress.

Over 1,000 users signed up for the waitlist for Postulate while I was developing it, and millions of words have been published on the platform since I opened it up. Try it out at postulate.us.

I was working at the Sacramento Bee and needed to transcribe a lot of interviews, and keep track of them.

I built a desktop client for Rev.ai, the speech transcription API I personally find most accurate for interviews. The client also has transcript editing and annotation features.

I built the appusing Vanilla JS and Tailwind, and bundled it into MacOS and Windows apps using Tauri. It stores all interviews offline after being transcribed through the API.

Interview Manager has been used by journalists at the Sacramento Bee and other newsrooms. It's the project I personally rely on the most day-to-day.

Try it out at interview-manager.szh.land.