I'm a CS & Mathematics student at Vanderbilt (after two years and a 3.97 GPA at Richmond) who likes to open the black box. I build products people actually use — and, just as often, I rebuild the machinery underneath them from first principles: the hash function that secures the internet, the codec inside every .jpg, a working CPU at the level of its gates. Half Thai, half Brooklyn, raised in a teak house in Chiang Mai, now based in New York City.
- 🔭 Building now — M.E.N.S.A (an AI macro-optimization engine) and WhatsCrackin! (my first startup swing)
- 🧠 Into — AI/ML, robotics, applied math, and CTF security
- 🔬 Researching — perception & navigation for mobile robots
- 🗣 Bilingual — native English & Thai
- 🌐 The full story lives at davematnat.com — a digital home built to grow for decades
| Project | What it is | Built with |
|---|---|---|
| M.E.N.S.A | An AI macro-optimization engine — it doesn't just log your meal, it mathematically constructs the optimal one | Python · optimization · full-stack |
| WhatsCrackin! 🏆 | A community platform for local events — and the pitch that took 1st runner-up at Accelerate DC | React · Node · MongoDB |
| UnWasteIt 🍎 | An iOS app that nudges you before food expires — WWDC22 Swift Student Challenge winner, built at sixteen | Swift · SwiftUI |
| Spider-Bot | A Discord bot that answers campus questions with RAG over scraped university data | Python · LLMs · retrieval |
| This House | The portfolio you're reading about — a hand-built digital home, editable through its own private CMS | React · Vite · Tailwind |
Because reading is not knowing. Each of these is the black box, taken apart and rebuilt by hand:
- SHA-256, by hand — the internet's hash function in pure Python, deriving its "magic" constants from the roots of primes
- Huffman Coding — lossless compression that squeezes full novels ~43% smaller and decodes them back byte-for-byte, zero dependencies
- JPEG, rebuilt — the Discrete Cosine Transform pipeline behind every photo, so you can watch quality trade against size
- SVD image compression — compressing images with pure linear algebra: keep the loud singular directions, drop the whisper
- MIPS CPU from scratch + assembler — a processor at the datapath level, and the tool that turns assembly into the exact bits it decodes
- Research Engineer · Cobotiq / HIVE Lab, U. Richmond — LiDAR + odometry perception that cut robot collisions by 30%
- Data Structures TA & ACM Education Chair · U. Richmond — teaching the course from the other side of the desk
- IT Helpdesk Technician · U. Richmond — 300+ tickets/week (personal record: 102 devices in 3 hours)
- Orientation Advisor — guided 150+ international students through their first week
Languages
ML / Data
Web / Systems / Tools
| 🍎 Apple WWDC22 Swift Student Challenge — Winner (top 10% of 3,000+) | 🥇 Accelerate DC Pitch — 1st Runner-Up · $2,000 (top 2 of 23) |
| 🚩 2× CTF Champion — U. Richmond, 2024 & 2025 (Assura Inc.) | 🎓 3.97 / 4.0 GPA — Dean's List & A-List |
| 🥈 Silver Medal — Indonesia Youth Intl. Science Fair (NLP chatbot) | 🥇 1st Runner-Up — Science & Tech Idea Contest (non-invasive glucose reader) |
