About Me
Hey, I'm Shahir! I'm a software engineer starting my Master's in Computer Science at NYU, and before that I studied computer science and math at Dickinson College.
Most recently I worked at Sarva, a startup that helps neighborhood grocery shops run their store by voice. A lot of the shop owners were still tracking inventory on paper, so I built the voice assistant that lets them add stock or check what sold just by talking to it in their own language. While I was there, Sarva was picked for the gener8tor and Meta gBETA accelerator and made the finals at two pitch competitions.
Before Sarva, I was a software engineer intern on FarmData2, a research project at Dickinson College backed by the National Science Foundation and PASA Sustainable Agriculture. We built open source software that vegetable farms use to log their daily work, from seeding to harvest, and keep the records they need for organic certification.
I also contribute to Mermaid.js, the open source tool that turns a few lines of text into flowcharts and diagrams, used by GitHub and Microsoft. It gets over 10 million downloads a week, and I'm ranked 25th out of more than 600 contributors.
In my free time I build my own apps, like GrabPic. After weddings and events, I'd end up searching the album for each person's face and sending them their photos one at a time, over and over. With GrabPic, the host shares one link and every guest takes a selfie to get only the photos they're in.
Feel free to check out my GitHub or reach out through the links below.
Tools and Technologies I've worked with
Languages
Frontend
Backend
Databases
Cloud & DevOps
AI & Data
APIs & Services
Testing
Tooling
Work Experience
Software Engineer
SarvaCarlisle, PAsarvabazaar.com
- Replaced pen and paper inventory at independent grocery stores with a voice assistant that updates stock in 90+ languages
- Integrated Stripe so every payment splits between the store and the driver and no card is charged until pickup
- Improved product and inventory search 7% by adding semantic search with OpenAI embeddings alongside keyword matching
- Built 3 CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions running 2,604 unit tests across 173 REST API endpoints to catch bugs before merge
- Chosen for the gener8tor and Meta gBETA accelerator and named a finalist at Ship Tank and launchU pitch competitions
Open Source Contributor
Mermaid.jsRemotePull requestsContributor rankingGitHub repository
- Ranked 25th among 600+ contributors by merging 3 pull requests into a diagramming library with 10M+ weekly downloads
- Shipped chart and journey diagram features into a 100,000 line TypeScript codebase used by GitHub and Microsoft
- Wrote Cypress end-to-end tests for each feature and cleared every automated check before a maintainer approved it
Software Engineer Intern
FarmData2, Dickinson CollegeCarlisle, PAGitHub repositoryPull requests
- Cut page load time by 60% on a National Science Foundation funded farm platform by moving 22+ Vue.js components to Vuex
- Automated crop logging to save farmers 12+ hours a week by building 18+ Node.js REST APIs and 30+ Cypress tests
Teaching Assistant
Computer Science Department, Dickinson CollegeCarlisle, PA
- Raised average assignment scores by 15% for 25+ students across 6 semesters through weekly Python and Java code reviews
Software Developer, Volunteer
84 LumberRemoteFeatured in Dickinson News
- Converted 10,000+ lines of legacy CBASIC into Python and Java for a $9B retailer by building a translator with ANTLR
Open Source Contributions
An open source tool that turns plain text into flowcharts and diagrams.
I've merged 3 pull requests into Mermaid, and every change I made shipped with Cypress end-to-end tests and passed all of its automated checks before a maintainer approved it. Here's what I added:
The projects I've contributed to, with a link to each merged pull request.
Open Source Portfolio →Hackathon Experience
Prospectus
HoyaHacks
HoyaHacks was my first hackathon. Our team wanted to build an AI assistant that could answer students' questions about any college, and we planned a full retrieval-augmented generation setup on Azure to power it.
We didn't get it working in time. We had the website and the architecture mapped out, but the pieces never came together into something we could demo, so later that year I went into PennApps focused on getting everything connected early.
Tech Stack:
SweetFriend
PennApps
One of my teammates at PennApps lives with type 1 diabetes, and carb counting and insulin dosing were a daily guessing game for them. So we built SweetFriend, which shows live readings from a Dexcom glucose monitor and estimates the carbs in a meal from a single photo.
I built the React frontend, including the glucose chart where meals and workouts show up on the timeline. This time everything came together, and every major feature was working by the end of the weekend.
Tech Stack:
Albatross
HackHarvard
At HackHarvard, two of my teammates had felt unsafe walking through parts of Boston, so we built Albatross, a navigation app that finds a fast walking route that stays out of crime hot zones.
We turned 50K+ crime records into hot zones, and I built the Vue.js frontend that shows them on the map along with the safer route. By the end of the 36 hours, we had it routing live through Boston.
Tech Stack:
Education
New York University
New York, NY
Degree: M.S. in Computer Science
Coursework: Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Big Data, Virtual and Augmented Reality
Sep 2026 - May 2028 (expected)Dickinson College
Carlisle, PA
Degree: B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics
GPA: 3.52 / 4.00
Coursework: Data Structures, Analysis of Algorithms, Operating Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, Database Systems
Honors: Dean's List, Pi Mu Epsilon (math honor society), The 1783 Scholarship
Aug 2021 - May 2025Certifications
CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science
Harvard's intro course on HarvardX, where I learned C and memory management before moving on to Python, SQL, and Flask.
MATLAB Onramp
An intro course from MathWorks on working with matrices, plotting data, and writing MATLAB scripts.
My GitHub Stats
Check Out My Projects
Everything I've built outside of work, including my hackathon projects.