Asa Shepard

asa.shepard@gmail.com

I am a student software developer at Williams College. I'm currently working on an interactive web app for this website, an android app, and analyzing live sets of data using machine learning.

From this website, you can visit my GitHub page, visit my LinkedIn profile, or view some of the short films I've made.

When I'm not programming or filmmaking, I'm training to compete for the Williams track team over the 400m and 800m distances.

Below I've described some of the software projects I've worked on.

ErcotMonitor  GitHub

In Austin during the years of 2021 and 2022, winter storms would bring the usually-warm city to a halt. They also would risk leaving the city without power for extended periods of time.

Much of Texas including Austin runs on its own independent electrical grid, managed by ERCOT. ERCOT also publishes several metrics about the grid on a live website.

During times when losing power was a risk, myself and many of my peers would constantly monitor ERCOT's page to see if demand for power would exceed supply or if the grid frequency would drop dangerously low. That's when I was inspired to add a bot to Discord that would notify us when something changed.

I originally created this bot in 2022, and I recently polished its features and added predictions using a more accurate regression model.

Spigot Plugins

HungerMC  GitHub

HungerMC was a Minecraft server developed by myself and a couple of my classmates starting in 2020 and continuing through 2021. We added custom-coded plugins to the server, server-side alterations to the game that extended game features, augmented the game visually, or altered the game in some other way.

Plugins included a custom-built API to use between plugins, cosmetic alterations and monitoring features for chat and client-side interaction, and later on a protection plugin and a "clans" plugin both of which I coded from scratch and can be found on GitHub.

Community events would be held often, eqch requiring their own plugin code to track players' actions and store data, first using JSON and later SQL. Most plugins for HungerMC and NautilusMC exist in their respective GitHub organizations.

NautilusMC / Other

NautilusMC was a reboot of HungerMC in 2022 with which I experimented further with plugin development, fleshing out old plugins and implementing features such as language translation using the DeepL API.

I helped some of my classmates develop their independent plugins including minigames some of which are still in active development.

I also developed plugins independently, publishing some to the Spigot community platform where they were downloaded thousands of times.

This Website  GitHub

This website! I used HTML and CSS to design the site, and I am deploying it with Firebase. It currently serves as a personal repository of my work across software and film, and I'm working on adding more pages with more features.