Devon Schwartz

Computer Science Student at UT Austin

About Me

I am a junior attending the University of Texas at Austin to pursue a B.S in computer science. I am also working on a teaching certificate for high school computer science and math. I currently work as a TA for Data Structures and Algorithms. In this job I have the privilege of helping students during office hours and weekly discussion sections. For the last two summers, I worked at State Farm as a software engineer intern. I am currently interested in system software, full stack development, and cloud computing.
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In high school, I started my first job during sophomore year of high school as a programming instructor at Code Ninjas Memorial. During my junior year, I founded Let's Code Spring Branch, a free summer coding camp for middle schoolers in my district. I also had a privilege of directing the weekly coding club and summer camp at Family Point Resources, a local community center. I am so grateful that the coding club and Let's Code Spring Branch have continued to operate under new student leadership after I graduated.
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Throughout my academic career, I have been involved in a diverse set of organizations. In high school, I served as the Vice President of the computer science club and participated in speech and debate. Currently, I am a member of various groups such as the UT Running Club, UTeach Natural Sciences program, and UTCS Outreach.
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My favorite hobbies are running, biking, reading history books, and cooking.

Experience

UT Computer Science Department
‍Undergraduate Course Assistant for Data Structures and Algorithms (January 2024 - Present)

Led discussion sections of over 20 students.
Held weekly office hours to answer questions from 300+ students in the class on programming assignments and content-related concerns.
Graded 3 exams per semester

State Farm
Software Engineer Intern (May 2023 - August 2024)

Summer 2024

Created a React UI component that assists California agents
Reconfigured and streamlined Playwright UI-Integration tests for an application serving agents nationwide

Summer 2023

Created an AWS Lambda and Event Bridge system to manage scheduling for thousands of adjusters
Used Dynamo DB to handle concurrency issues in the appointment status workflow
Led a presentation for over 20 engineers and product owners on backend development for the new claims scheduling platform

UT Environmental Science Institute
‍UTeach Intern (September 2023 - December 2023)

Created companion educator guides for Hot Science Cool Talks. These guides will be used in hundreds of classrooms
Developed original and engaging STEM activities for several Hot Science Cool Talks topics.
Followed 5E lesson format

Code Ninjas

Lead Instructor (June 2021 - March 2023)

Instructor (March 2020 - June 2021)

Directed summer coding camps of 10-30 students
Managed teams of 2-3 assisting counselors
Guided students between the ages of 7-14 in creating 2D games using JavaScript
Led the transition to virtual instruction on Zoom during 2020
Discussed educational priorities and issues with parents
Trained incoming instructors in how to evaluate students' work, address bugs in students' programs, and communicate with younger aged kids effectively

Let's Code Spring Branch

Founder, Lab Leader (February 2021 - June 2022)

Created a free coding camp for Spring Branch ISD middle school students
Partnered with Spring Branch to host the camp at Stratford High School in 2022
Enrolled 92 students in 2022 over two sessions
Managed a team of 17 volunteer instructors
Assembled a curriculum for courses in Python, Scratch, and web development (HTML/CSS/JS)
Link to website: www.letscodespringbranch.com
Hosted the camp virtually in 2021, with an inaugral class of 49 students over 3 sessions
Still hosted under new high school student leadership

Family Point Resources

Volunteer Coding Club Director (August 2021 - June 2022)

Taught elementary school students Python with Turtle at weekly afterschool meetings
Recruited 9 other volunteers from Stratford High School
Directed a weeklong summer coding camp taught in Scratch and Python with Turtle

Education

The University of Texas at Austin (2022 - Present)

Pursuing B.S in Computer Science

Past CS Courses: Discrete Math, Data Structures and Algorithms, Computer Organization and Architecture, Principles of Computer Systems, Algorithms and Complexity, Virtualization
Favorite Teaching Courses: Classroom Interactions, UTeach Step 1
Interesting Courses: The Tones of Inequality, Measuring Racial Inequality
Member of the UT Running Club, UTeach Natural Sciences, and UTCS Outreach
Undergraduate TA for CS314: Data Structures
Expected to graduate in 2026

Stratford High School (2018 - 2022)

High School Diploma

Graduated valedictorian with 4.0 GPA
Relevant Courses: AP Computer Science A, AP Calculus BC, AP Statistics
Competed on the Stratford Speech and Debate team in foreign extemp
Vice President of the Computer Science Club

Completed Projects

An ariel satellite view of Hurricane Harvey

CatastroBuddy — 2024 State Farm Hackathon Finalist

For the 2024 State Farm Hackathon, my team and I developed a web app to log household items before or after a catastrophe so that they can be viewed by an adjuster. This was a full stack project that used React, Flask, and MongoDB. We created the front end during the Hackathon and continued working on the project after the hackathon. I came up with the idea after my family's experience during Hurricane Harvey logging our damaged household items. We found there was not a streamlined process to send this data to the adjuster, and much data was sent over email. I was incredibly fortunate to have parents that were organized and thoughtful during the storm, but there is still room for improvement for technology that help individuals after a catastrophe. In the future, a portal will be designed so that an adjuster can see the client's household items.

Link: CatastroBuddy
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Linux Containers Open Source Contribution (May 2024)

I made contributons to the LXC and LXCFS projects. In LXC, I worked with fellow developers to fix an issue with the lxc-top, which prints container statistics. LXC was unable to print those statistics because Linux changed its control group from cgroup to cgroup2. My second contribution in LXCFS updated the implementation FUSE filesystem calls to avoid segmentation faults when checking the path of the file.

I learned a lot from these contributions and I plan to continue contributing to LXC and other systems projects in the future. It is really cool working with other developers from across the globe and solving real issues that people run into. The LXC maintainers are super helpful and supportive.

A graphic of a virus particle

US COVID Data Tracker Package (February 2021)

This is a Python package that interfaces with the NYTimes COVID-19 data set to allow users to gather data from specific states to analyze trends in cases and deaths. For example, I analyzed COVID-19 data from Halloween and July 4 of 2020 to determine which holiday had more COVID-19 cases. The package also allows users to graph cases on an interval of time from a certain state. I use the Pandas and MatPlotLib libraries to analyze data.

Link: COVID State Tracker on PyPI

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