Cooper Morgan

Broken Alidade is an online literary journal I build and run solo, from the public submission funnel to the full editorial back office (review queue, plagiarism search, team accounts, a Site CMS, and a live workbench for typesetting pieces). It's a Go + HTMX/Templ backend with a strict TypeScript frontend; the ops are the fun part, with Litestream replicating SQLite to Cloudflare R2 from inside the server binary. The submission funnel just shipped, and the remaining road to 1.0 is the public redesign, a submitter portal, and migrating the first issue in.

After experiencing frustration using my school's course scheduler, I decided to attempt to make my own as a part of WWU's ACM club. Over two years of prototyping, refinement, and maintenance have created this full-stack web application that has served up to 1,000 monthly students. The system features a high-performance Go backend with concurrent web scraping, bitmask-based conflict detection, and a TypeScript/React frontend with real-time filtering and calendar visualization. This project has been heavily advertised to students, and we have used their feedback to improve the system.

While trying to play Hunt: Showdown on Linux with Wayland, the display froze whenever the game launched. I dug into the Wine Wayland driver and found it was sending incorrect xdg_toplevel state transitions when CryEngine fake-minimizes during startup. This froze the Vulkan present due to a missing feature in the winewayland driver. Wrote a test program, filed Bug 59577, and landed a three-commit fix! I'm hoping that this can lead me into making more FOSS contributions.

For my undergraduate research, I spearheaded the development of a high-performance visualization system built for Raspberry Pi 5 using Go and Vulkan. I created a concurrent chunk system to handle large NASA datasets. The system is designed to be modular, allowing for easy integration of new data sources and visualization techniques. We are hoping to have this implemented in hobbyist aircrafts to save some lives.

A web application to streamline grading workflows for instructors and TAs, featuring backend integration with Canvas LMS using Django and a responsive React frontend. Developed based on qualitative research with faculty about their grading processes. We deployed and used it internally on a DigitalOcean droplet, but it never reached a production release. Either way, this extensively strengthened my skills by using Python and Django for backend development.