about
i'm a computer science student at the university of central florida based in orlando. most of my work has been in full-stack web development, with a growing interest in rust, systems work, and building software that feels simple and solid.
career-wise, i've worked across internships, startups, and student organizations, and i'm currently in the bny co-op program while helping lead knight hacks as vice president. i care a lot about making products feel clear and useful, not just technically impressive.
my parents are from cuba, and that shaped a lot of how i approach work: stay practical, work hard, and make things that actually help people.
experience
community work, internships, and product-heavy engineering roles that all taught me some version of the same thing: ship clearly, follow through, and make it easier for other people to build with you.
Jan 2026 - Present · 3 mos
Orlando, Florida, United States
vice president
helping lead knight hacks with a focus on partnerships, programming rhythm, and keeping the community ambitious without making it feel closed off.
Dec 2025 - Present · 4 mos
Orlando, Florida, United States
software engineer intern
working through the ucf co-op program on full-stack software and internal tools inside a much larger production environment.
Jan 2026 - Present · 3 mos
Remote
campus ambassador
helping students connect ai tools to real workflows instead of treating them like content machines.
Jun 2025 - Aug 2025 · 3 mos
Remote
software engineer intern
built software in a simulation-oriented environment where performance, correctness, and user clarity all had to coexist.
Apr 2025 - Jun 2025 · 3 mos
Orlando, Florida, United States
software engineer intern
worked on ai integration for data analytics tools, with a focus on making the capability feel legible and useful in practice.
Jun 2024 - Aug 2024 · 3 mos
Dallas, Texas, United States
software engineer intern
built software around games, interaction, and moment-to-moment responsiveness.
selected projects
A few projects that capture the overlap between product taste, modern web work, systems curiosity, and interaction-heavy experiments.
open source
an open-source fantasy console in rust with lua scripting, a tiny hardware spec, and enough tooling around it to feel like a real place to build.
winner
a multimodal accessibility prototype that turns muscle signals, motion data, and voice into live computer control.
winner
an ai-guided life atlas that interviews the user, branches possible futures, and turns those paths into an explorable graph.
blog
longer notes from hackathons, product experiments, and the work that still felt worth unpacking once the deadline was over.
january 2026
•5 min read
a note on stepping into the vice president role at knight hacks, what changed from organizer to leadership, and the kind of community work i want that role to unlock.
september 2025
•6 min read
a write-up on building ctrl-arm at shellhacks: the accessibility problem it was trying to solve, the hardware and ml tradeoffs that made it usable, and why the project landed with people.
contact
If you want the fast version, this page should do it. If you want the rest of the site, connect with ssh catala.dev.