About me
I have been passionate about programming for many years and am currently in my third year studying Computer Science at Iowa State University. In my free time, I enjoy working on Open Source Software and reading books.
Projects
Some of my more notable projects:
- xlang: An interpreter for a Scheme-like programming language written in Zig. Features a custom garbage collector and a WebAssembly-powered online playground.
- bertml: Library that exposes pre-trained machine learning models in JavaScript via Rust FFI (Foreign Function Interface).
- Udemy courses: Taught four free courses on Udemy on Python, Vue, and Gridsome with 30,000+ students worldwide.
- bf: A brainheck interprer in the TypeScript type system (the type system is Turing Complete).
- bsn: An interpreter for the Bussin esoteric language.
- Aister earned Best Solo Hack at GunnHacks 7.0 for a GPT-2 based LLM wrapper written in Rust before the release of ChatGPT and friends.
- Zig build ports for several C and C++ libraries.
And my favorite Open Source contributions:
- Contributed a NaN-boxing implementation, Weak* and FinalizationRegistry support, Float16Array proposal, and more to the Kiesel JavaScript engine.
- Wrote the initial code for the Nova JavaScript engine written in Rust with inspiration from Kiesel. This included basic bytecode generation and vm execution backed by Oxc’s parser.
- Collaborated with Ramsez Stamper and Bikramjit Sarker on SaySomethingNiceToday, an app for anonymously sending only nice mentions on Twitter.
Involvement
I regularly participate in hackathons and programming contests, often with a team:
- 1st place at Swan Hacks ’24 with Codegram, a pair programming-based tutoring platform. We used Next.js and I built the Monaco-powered editor and the live video/audio chat with WebRTC and WebSockets.
- 3rd place in the local group in the 2024 Regional ICPC NCNA Regional Programming Contest hosted at Iowa State University.
- Contributed to the development of a Telemetry dashboard for the PrISUm Solar Car for an embedded ARM Cortex-M Linux machine using C++, WebSockets, and Solid JS.
- Built Summit for HackISU, a Python-based website using OpenCV and FastAPI, which answers the question: Can I climb this tree?
Experience
I interned at Kingland Systems during the Summer of 2024 and 2025. During this time, I have gained valuable skills on building Java Spring Boot applications, creating Angular components, and managing AWS services with Terraform.
Skills
Rust, C++, Java, C, Zig, Python, React, Vue, Angular, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, Terraform, AWS
Contact
Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out at cartersnook04@gmail.com.