Hi, my name is

Anika Rao.

Full-Stack Engineer

CS senior who ships accessible, performance-obsessed web apps — React on the front, Go and Postgres underneath. Currently looking for a 2027 new-grad role.

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01.About Me

I got hooked on the web the day I inspected-element my high school's grade portal and realized every pixel was just code someone chose. Four years later I'm a senior at Cascadia State University building things I actually ship — from a transit app my whole campus uses to internal tooling at a health-tech startup.

Lately my energy goes into TransitPulse, a real-time bus tracker for the Cascade Valley system, and TA-ing our systems programming course. I care about the unglamorous parts: p95 latency, keyboard navigation, and error messages that don't gaslight the user.

When I'm not at a terminal I'm bouldering badly, or maintaining a small mechanical-keyboard firmware fork with three whole stars.

02.Experience

  • 2025 — Present

    Software Engineer Intern · Driftwave Labs

    • Rebuilt the analytics ingestion worker in Go, cutting event processing p95 from 840ms to 210ms.
    • Shipped a React dashboard used by 30+ enterprise customers; owned it from Figma handoff to on-call.
    • Added contract tests to the deploy pipeline that caught 3 breaking API changes before production.

  • Summer 2024

    Frontend Engineer Intern · Northbeam Health

    • Built the patient-intake flow in TypeScript + React Hook Form; reduced form abandonment by 22%.
    • Led an accessibility pass to WCAG AA across 14 screens — axe violations went from 118 to 0.

  • 2023 — Present

    Teaching Assistant, Systems Programming · Cascadia State CS

    • Run weekly labs on C, memory, and concurrency for ~90 students; wrote the course's Valgrind guide.
    • Built an autograder in Python that trimmed grading turnaround from 9 days to 36 hours.

03.Skills

Languages

TypeScript
92%
Go
80%
Python
78%
C
65%

Frameworks

React
90%
Next.js
84%
Node.js
82%
PostgreSQL
75%

Tools

Docker
72%
AWS
64%
Grafana
60%

04.Things I've Built

Featured Project

TransitPulse

Real-time bus tracker for the Cascade Valley transit system. A Go service polls GTFS-RT feeds, dedupes vehicle pings, and streams positions over WebSockets to a map UI that stays smooth on a four-year-old phone.

▲ 1.8k weekly riders · 99.6% feed uptime · 120ms median update

  • Go
  • WebSockets
  • React
  • MapLibre
  • Redis

Featured Project

Sandbox Autograder

Container-sandboxed autograder for C programming assignments, built for Cascadia State's systems course. Runs student submissions against hidden test suites with per-process memory caps and Valgrind reports baked into feedback.

▲ 12k submissions graded · 36h → instant feedback · 0 escapes

  • Python
  • Docker
  • seccomp
  • FastAPI
  • SQLite

Other Noteworthy Projects

  • hushd

    A tiny CLI that mutes noisy log lines by learned pattern instead of regex whack-a-mole. Written in Go, single static binary.

    ▲ 2.1k GitHub stars · 40% less log noise

    • Go
    • Cobra
    • BoltDB

  • Marginalia

    Local-first PDF annotator for lecture slides with instant full-text search across every note you've ever taken. Sync optional, privacy default.

    ▲ 600+ users at CSU · sub-50ms search

    • TypeScript
    • SQLite WASM
    • PDF.js

  • keeb-fw

    Fork of an open keyboard firmware adding per-key RGB reactive typing and a 40% smaller flash footprint via link-time GC.

    ▲ 40% smaller binary · 1kHz polling

    • C
    • ARM Cortex-M
    • CMake

05.Education

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Amazon Web Services, 2025
  • CKAD: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer — The Linux Foundation, 2026

06. What's Next?

Get In Touch

I'm interviewing for 2027 new-grad software engineering roles — full-stack or backend, teams that care about craft. My inbox is open, whether that's a role, a project, or just a good question about GTFS feeds.

Say Hello
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