Hi there!
I’m Josh Archibald,
a senior
I took a leave in spring 2021. This means I will finish classes in December 2022 and receive my degree in March 2023.
at Harvard studying computer science. With experience in edtech,
civic tech, and climate tech, I want to use my
skills to make the world a better place.
This is a photograph of me!
This past summer, I worked as a software engineering intern at H2Ok Innovations, a climate tech startup that is trying to reduce water waste in industrial manufacturing. In this role, I worked on several full-stack development projects, including both internal and client-facing apps.
In summer 2021, I served as a software engineering intern through the Civic Digital Fellowship, a technology internship program that gives innovative students the opportunity to solve pressing problems in federal agencies. My internship team developed data cleaning and classification techniques to assist with the quantification of environmental impacts on aircraft.
I previously worked as a research assistant at the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I worked on tools to analyze Scratch projects and helped develop a website for the Getting Unstuck professional development program.
In 2020 I interned at CS50, helping to design software tools to improve the student experience for Harvard’s introductory computer science course. I’ve also taught the course in both its undergraduate and law school iterations.
Outside of class, I enjoy volunteering my time teaching in Boston Public Schools - I taught American government as part of the Harvard CIVICS program for my first three semesters of college and recently served as the president of the Digital Literacy Project, which teaches middle school computer science.
I took a leave of absence from Harvard for the Spring 2021 semester due to the pandemic, but have since returned to classes. I will finish coursework in December 2022 and am actively searching for full-time software engineering roles with start dates in January 2023.
Contact Me
- You can reach me by email at jarchibald@college.harvard.edu.
Links
Projects
Vericlass
Jul 2020-Present
Designed a course-planning web app in Vue.js, allowing students to discover over 8,000 courses and course evaluations scraped using Selenium and Beautiful Soup. Containerized the scraper to run regularly on AWS ECS. Site visited by over 8,000 unique users.Getting Unstuck Web
Mar-Aug 2020
Contributed to a web app that encourages students to reflect on their Scratch projects by showcasing excerpts from their own, as well as others’, work.Room Designer
Apr-May 2020
Developed an interface to create simple interior designs using speech recognition and the Leap Motion Controller. For MIT’s 6.835: Intelligent Multimodal User Interfaces.Postcards
Jan 2020
Created a Python script to generate postcard-style images based on an image’s EXIF geodata.Cookie Analysis
Dec 2019
Built a Chrome extension with which users can see basic metrics about the cookies on a page.Experience
Software Engineering Intern, H2Ok Innovations
Somerville, MA • May − Aug 2022
- Architected and developed backend Flask APIs and React frontend for internal web app of climate tech startup.
- Designed React components and API routes for a full-stack redesign of company’s client-facing app.
- Automated web app releases, API testing, and configuration propagation.
Software Engineering Fellow, Civic Digital Fellowship, U.S. Special Operations Command
Remote • Jun − Aug 2021
- Developed data cleaning pipelines for an aircraft fault record classification model; helped develop model.
- Analyzed aircraft fault records using classification model results; compiled and presented report on findings.
- Selected from a competitive applicant pool of 1,700+ students with an acceptance rate of 6%.
Teaching Fellow, CS50, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Cambridge, MA • Sep 2019 − Jan 2021
- Led 23-person 23 students in fall 2019, 15 in fall 2020, if we’re crunching numbers. weekly recitation and created original slides and practice exercises. Led a two-hour seminar on Flask web development.
- Reviewed, tested, and graded students’ final projects. Assisted students in planning of projects.
- Helped students at office hours for CS50, CS50 for JDs, and the Harvard Business Analytics Program. The latter two are essentially spinoff courses designed for law and online business certificate students, respectively.
- Received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Office of Undergraduate Education in fall 2020. Awarded to instructors with an overall rating of 4.50 or higher (out of 5) in course evaluations.
Software Engineering Intern, CS50
Cambridge, MA • Jun − Aug 2020
- Overhauled SQL library, used by thousands of students each year, to handle both manual and auto transactions robustly.
- Collaborated on a React app to compare similar student work side-by-side; added PDF export and a D3 graph component.
- Devised new unit tests for 6 libraries and software tools used by students and teaching staff.
Research Assistant, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Cambridge, MA • Feb − Aug 2020
- Developed a Python package Most of Scratch’s own software is written in Node.js, but we decided on a Python-based stack. to scrape and aggregate data about Scratch projects, studios, and users. Tested with Pytest and Travis CI; deployed API documentation using Sphinx.
- Worked with team to design a website that allows users to reflect on their learning progress in Scratch through specific teachable examples from other people’s projects and guided reflection questions.
The project summary page of the Clowder software.
Alas, the app is no longer live, but I do have a video of the time selection and emotional state feedback inputs I designed. - Contributed heavily to site’s backend, including MongoDB cache backend; Celery worker app; and Scratch code analysis.
- Collaborated with team to make design decisions based on technical and pedagogical concerns alike. Contributed to paper on findings (publication pending) by combining and organizing data from Google Analytics and the site’s database.
- Software used in a two-week professional development program by over 300 teachers to analyze over 2,300 projects.
Information Technology Intern, Montville Public Schools
Oakdale, CT • Jun 2016 − Aug 2019 (4 summers)
- Designed Python scripts to parse and clean student data, easing transition between Student Information Systems.
- Developed tools using Python to manage the return of old and distribution of new teacher laptops during lease transition, tracking asset and serial information and using that data to find missing computers using Meraki network dashboard.
- Redesigned sections of district website;
I even wrote an Electron app so school admin could generate the HTML and JS for a landing page slideshow, which I had to write manually because of the CMS used.
helped plan and execute a file server migration.
Skills
Below is a full listing of the programming languages with which I feel comfortable, and a brief listing of some of the libraries and tools with which I have experience. This is not an exhaustive list of every language and library I have ever used.
Each skill is followed by the year in which I first used it.
Programming languages
- C (2018)
- HTML + CSS (2013)
- JavaScript (2013)
- Matlab (2021)
- MongoDB (2020)
- Node.js (2018)
- PHP (2014)
- Python (2015)
- SQL (2014)
Libraries
- A-Frame (2018)
- Celery (2020)
- Express.js (2018)
- Flask (2018)
- Google Cloud Speech Recognition (2020)
- Google Earth Engine (2021)
- jQuery (2013)
- Pandas (2021)
- Plotly (Python, JS) (2021)
- Pygame (2020)
- React (2020)
- Three.js (2018)
- Vue.js (2018)
Tools and devops things
- Auth0 (2022)
- AWS - CloudWatch, DMS, ECR, ECS (Fargate), Elastic Beanstalk, EventBridge, IAM, RDS, Secrets Manager (2022)
- Docker (2020)
- Git (2015)
- Jupyter/Google Colab (2019)
- Netlify (2020)
- Pytest (2020)
- Python Package Index (as a publisher) (2020)
- Sphinx Documentation (2020)
- Travis CI (2020)