About Me
Hey, I'm Shahir! I'm a software engineer starting my Master's in Computer Science at NYU, after completing my Bachelor's in Computer Science and Mathematics at Dickinson College.
Most recently, I worked at Sarva, a startup for neighborhood grocery shops still keeping inventory on paper. I built a voice assistant that lets owners update stock in their own language.
Before Sarva, I was a software engineer intern on FarmData2, a National Science Foundation funded project at Dickinson College. We built open source software that helps vegetable farms keep records for organic certification.
I also contribute to Mermaid.js, an open source diagramming tool used by GitHub and Microsoft. The features I've added put me in the top 25 of its more than 600 contributors.
In my free time, I build a lot of personal projects. The latest ones run on a home server I set up myself. You can find all of my projects here.
I'd love to hear from you, so say hi 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
- Cut inventory time by 60% by building a voice assistant that lets store owners manage inventory in their own languages
- Created 3 GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines that run 2,604 Vitest tests on 173 TypeScript APIs to catch bugs before production
- Deployed 12 serverless Firebase Cloud Functions on Google Cloud Platform that retry failed payouts and restock abandoned carts
- Lowered zero-result searches 7% by adding semantic search with OpenAI embeddings to keyword search for natural language queries
- Reduced AI costs by adding Redis rate limiting and a token allowance per user to the Next.js API routes that call OpenAI
- Built the product that put Sarva in the gener8tor and Meta gBETA accelerator and the Ship Tank and launchU finals
Open Source Contributor
Mermaid.jsRemotePull requestsContributor rankingGitHub repository
- Added 3 D3.js features with Cypress tests to a TypeScript library with 12M+ weekly downloads used by GitHub and Microsoft
- Passed CI/CD checks and maintainer review on all 3 pull requests in the 200,000 line codebase to rank 25th of 600+ contributors
Software Engineer Intern
FarmData2, Dickinson CollegeCarlisle, PAGitHub repositoryPull requests
- Saved farmers 12+ hours a week by automating crop logging with 18+ transactional Node.js REST APIs on PostgreSQL
- Cut page load time by 60% on a National Science Foundation funded farm platform by moving 22+ Vue.js components to Vuex
- Authored 25 merged pull requests with 30+ Cypress integration tests in Agile sprints to become the project's 2nd top contributor
Teaching Assistant
Computer Science Department, Dickinson CollegeCarlisle, PA
- Raised assignment scores 15% for 25+ students over 6 semesters of weekly Python and Java code reviews and office hours
Software Engineer, Volunteer
84 LumberRemoteFeatured in Dickinson News
- Converted legacy CBASIC to Python and Java with an ANTLR4 translator that walks abstract syntax trees
- Co-designed a plan with 11 teammates to modernize 50,000+ lines of CBASIC that shaped the $9B retailer's roadmap
Open Source Contributions
Mermaid is an open source tool that turns a few lines of text into flowcharts and diagrams. It's used by GitHub and Microsoft and downloaded over 12 million times a week, so every change has to pass its CI checks and a maintainer's review before it's merged.
I've had 3 pull requests merged into its 200,000 line TypeScript codebase, each one with Cypress end-to-end tests. Those three put me 25th out of more than 600 contributors.
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, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Object-Oriented Programming, Databases
Honors: Cum Laude, 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.