Finishing work at RBC, more AI development progress, and traveling
August Newsletter 🏕️☀️
Hey! If you’re new here, I’m Vinaya and welcome to Bits and Bytes! I'm a 17 y/o tech nerd from Toronto that’s always building. 👩💻
In this monthly newsletter, I share Bits and Bytes of my learnings to help you grow from my key insights! 🌱 Stay tuned for bits of self-improvement techniques, and bytes of groundbreaking tech innovations.
Finishing off my internship at RBC 💼
August marked the end of my summer internship at RBC on the DevOps engineering team. This month I finished my work on the Graphana dashboards and focused on preparing presentation decks and videos for the final Summer Tech Labs executive presentation demo.
Graphana is a monitoring tool where you can visualize insights that can guide decision-making. I quite enjoyed both designing and creating the dashboards as we got to first understand all of the user personas and break down what insights our stakeholders would like to see. We then went data hunting, pulling data from external APIs and tables, and finally running SQL queries.
Since we were specifically building our dashboards to show analytics on courses taken in Learning Labs (RBC’s internal Coursera), we ended up focusing on building panels for visualizing the # of users completing a course, # of users completing each lab, which teams the people completing each lab belong to and more.
Thank you to everyone I crossed paths with this term, I’ve had such a blast!
BenchSci Challenge 🤖
In July I participated in a consulting challenge with BenchSci focusing on building ML and AI-based solutions that address specific aspects of productivity at BenchSci.
In talking to our mentor Shahar, we automatically noticed so many inefficiencies in her current ways of work. One such problem was the way work was documented and accessed. Apparently, all data is thrown into Google drives and senior staff must individually onboard new employees and bring them up to speed.
That’s why my team and I settled on leveraging LLMs to do the heavy lifting. We developed BenchSidekick, a tool that would connect with your Google drives and help go through the resources with you, as well as answer any questions that may arise.
Since BenchSidekick is straightforward and feasible, we spent a significant amount of time dedicated to building a v1 proof of concept of the idea.
We decided to use Streamlit, and Langchain and wrote a custom Python script to scrape the Google drives. Having done most of my development with JavaScript frameworks it was cool building a full-stack app in Python.
We ended up making it to the finals of the consulting challenge and I enjoyed working with my team so much. Shoutout to Harsehaj, Priyal, Adam, and Anh!
Here is our final standalone deck and git repo.
Building Clossette for Buildspace s4 👗
I have also decided to work on a fun side project Clossette for this season’s BuildSpace Nights and Weekends with Harsehaj.
Clossette is a closet cataloguing and outfit recommender. Our goal is to have Clossette be like your own personal assistant who knows you and your preferences, your plans for the day and weather and then uses all that information to select the most perfect outfits for you each day. We also hope to leverage Clossette to prevent overspending and reduce clothing waste.
We started with a proof of concept by developing Clossette in the form of a chatbot. We just finished building the closet cataloguing features (digitalizing your closet), and we are now working on synchronizing various forms of data to get your recommendations.
Check out our v1 and v2 launches on Twitter, and join our waitlist here!
Building FeedBackFriend at Leaderley 📝
I've been working with Leaderley International Inc. for two months now to build out FeedbackFriend to help you, your friends, family, co-workers, bosses and more uncover blind spots free of charge, by leveraging AI and automation!
Our goal is to effortlessly collect anonymous feedback for you, and then you receive a personalized summary of your top 5 strengths and growth areas. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in partaking in beta testing and keep your eyes peeled for the FeedbackFriend launch coming in October!
I’m also working on an AI-led interview process now to share feedback in a chat interface and then generate insights based on a collection of interviews.
After going through every AI chatbot platform alive and building my own from scratch I have become a pro, so feel free to hit me up if anyone needs advice on building one. Chatbots have blown up recently and I’m surprised to see that many platforms have taken different approaches to building them. Some require a lot of hand-holding and static workflows while others are powered by agents and get more creative. As for all of the automation work I’ve done, Zapier has become my new best friend. From pulling data to dynamic PDF creation to custom code and webhooks accessing any platform, they’ve created an amazing user experience.
Disconnecting for a week in New York and Connecticut 🧘♀️
In August I also had the privilege of attending a fully funded educational retreat as a part of the Explore Fellowship by Impact Labs. Surrounded by 60 ambitious teens from around the world and 9 incredible councillors, this week is one I’ll never forget!
I spent the week disconnected from my normal life, focused on building deep connections, had the nerdiest conversations on social impact, poverty, public health, transformers, energy and more and of course barely slept every night.
I ended up grouping a bunch of my takeaways together and put them into a Medium article here. I talk about slowing down, being present, and living spontaneously, the value of people around you and the importance of community, my thoughts on Effective Altruism, and a personal reflection on my favourite talk by Pablo.
Closing thoughts and what’s next? 💭
Asides from all of the development work, August has comprised of water balloon fights, corn mazes and hikes with the family. Summer has sprinted away too fast but I'm also excited for the school year.
For September I’ll be focusing on completing the builds for FeedbackFriend and Clossette, attending Hack the North, and working on university applications.
Going forward, I’m also going to be posting bi-monthly updates on Bits and Bytes instead of monthly, but I will be posting my work on other socials so feel free to keep up with my work on Twitter and LinkedIn.
That’s it for now, see you in a bit!
Look forward to hearing more of your amazing updates! Explore was THE BEST time with you!