Luke Colombo

Computer Science & Psychology

Hi, I'm Luke, a third-year computer science & cognitive psychology major at Northeastern University. I've been passionate about CS ever since my first college class, and hope to pursue software engineering, AI, or network science. I eventually want to combine CS with psychology or another social science in the field of research. I have experience coding in Java, Python, MySQL, and the front end stack (which I learned by creating this website!)

Click here to view or download my resume as a PDF.

Outside of school, I play music (piano, drums, and guitar), and read sci-fi and mystery novels. I also love getting outside and going mountain biking, or playing basketball or volleyball.

My Skills

Below are some of my technical skills. I'm always looking to learn more.

Java

Python

Natural Language Processing

React

MySQL

Command Line Scripting

JavaScript

TCP/IP Sockets

HTML

CSS

OpenCV

SPSS Statistics

LaTeX

Git

HTTP

My Experience

A short summary of my work experience.

Digital Ready - Full Time

Computer Science Studio Manager (July - December 2023)

The Computer Science Bootcamp intends to give students preparation for college-level CS classes, as well as work experience. I managed a team of Lab Leaders, leading the class with lectures, curriculum planning, and daily activities exploring Python, OpenCV, UI/UX, and machine learning.

Safeway - Part Time

Courtesy Clerk (July 2020 - May 2021)

I helped with bagging groceries, cleaning the store, and communicating between managers and customers during my senior year of high school.

Soundwaves - Part Time

Piano/Volunteer Tutor (September 2019 - March 2020)

Before it's shutdown due to Covid-19, I volunteered at Soundwaves, a non-profit focused on supplementing the underfunded music education at local elementary schools.

My Projects

Some personal and academic projects I've completed.

Connect 4 (Java)

Outside of class I recreated Connect 4, playable in console and on a GUI created with the Swing library. I used model, view, controlled architecture to allow for different boards, players. Currently adding capabilities to let user play against the computer, using the strategy design pattern.

Connections Maker (ReactJS)

I'm currently teaching myself React by coding a connections-maker application. Inspired by the New York Times Connections game, I wanted a way to make my own puzzles and send them to my friends, and thought it would be a great opportunity to hone my web development skills.

RAFT Implementation (Python)

For my CS3700 final, we implemented the RAFT algorithm for consensus and fault tolerance in a simulated distributed database with TCP/IP sockets. We had keep in mind query latency, consistency, and packet overhead, with simulations for various unreliable networks.

Snake (Racket)

My first personal project, made during my first ever CS class, was recreating Snake. I used a lot of the principles and design patterns we were learning (recursion, linked lists, abstraction) and had a lot of fun experimenting with coding on my own.

Image Processor (Java)

My final for CS3500, this image processing application has a GUI created with the Java Swing library. You can load images in, edit them with buttons like brighten, greyscale, blur, and mosaic, and then save them to your local device.

Rat-a-tat-cat (Python)

This was my family's go-to card game as a kid, and I recreated it in Python in order to sharpen my coding skills. It's playable on the command line with a colored text display, and has rudimentary AIs to play against. It was also a fun exercise in choosing what information should be available/hidden to the user.

BGP Router (Python)

This is an implementation of a Border Gateway Protocol router. Ran inside a simulator, it forwards packets, manages and updates a routing table, performs bitwise manipulation on IP addresses, and was a major pain to debug. This taught me so much about networking protocols and socket programming.

Web Crawler (Python)

This is a web crawler/spider that traverses through the CS3700 class website. I learned a lot about parsing HTML, as well as the various HTTP methods like GET and POST and how they play into the larger internet model.

Bracket Maker (ReactJS)

I'm currently teaching myself React by coding a bracket-maker application. My friends and I sometimes make brackets of our favorite songs, movies, etc. on paper, and translating that activity to code has taught me a lot about front-end development and Javascript.

N-Gram Language Model (Python)

N-Gram language models use n-length sequences of words, along with a ton of probability calculations in order to generate text. This model is first trained on a dataset, then generates sentences using the Shannon method. It also has a method for calculating perplexity, an evaulation metric.