Technical projects

The engineering work behind the IT career. Kept brief on purpose; the home lab is the main story.

Selected work

Santa Clara University, 2024 to 2026

2024 to 2025
Senior design

Secure Your Hardware

AES-128 embedded security with fault-injection countermeasures

Implemented AES-128 on a microcontroller and used a ChipWhisperer to inject faults and capture power traces, then hardened the implementation against them. Countermeasures combined randomized execution with triple modular redundancy, cutting faulty outputs by 98.9%. Analyzed 1,000+ power traces and categorized over 50,000 test outcomes to measure the result. Published as a senior thesis.

CARM AssemblyPythonChipWhispererLinux CLI

2026

Simple C Compiler

Six-phase compiler for a subset of C

Lexical analysis, parsing, semantic checks, optimization, and 32-bit x86 code generation, built phase by phase in C++. Validated against 110+ passing test cases covering valid programs, syntax errors, semantic errors, and the behavior of the generated output.

C++x86 assemblyLinux CLI

2026

Stock Market Simulation System

Object-oriented trading simulation in C++

Modeled traders, stocks, market activity, and buy/sell order matching. Stress-tested across 65,411 completed trades with zero errors, and measured operation timing by type: market buy/sell around 47 to 48 microseconds, limit and cancel around 15 to 16 microseconds.

C++Performance testing

Why this matters for IT work

None of these are help desk projects, but each one was mostly debugging: reading logs, forming a hypothesis, changing one thing, and testing again. The fault-injection work in particular was months of watching a system fail in slightly different ways and figuring out why. That is the same loop as a ticket queue, at a lower level of the stack.