About
How I got here.
2023
The beginning was robots and games.
My first serious builds were in high school. A maze-solving robot car proved a breadth-first search on a Raspberry Pi Pico and won an award at TVSEF 2023. Then came Java games — a two-player physics platformer and a tile-based arcade with enemies that genuinely pathfind. I learned more about loops and collision response from aircraft falling out of the sky in my own code than from any tutorial.
2023–2024
Then hardware.
GreenGuardian was an autonomous robot that drove through fields, found invasive weeds with an on-device TensorFlow Lite model, and used colour to aim a spray at only the weed. It hit 94% detection precision, cut sprayed herbicide by roughly 90%, and brought home bronze from the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Around it I built a drone that finds litter, GPS-tags it, and files it to a live map.
2025
The OS detour.
I got tired of fighting my own computer, so I shipped my own. Flow Arch is an Arch Linux distribution with compositor-level focus enforcement — the OS version of do not disturb. It blocks distracting windows by title, screen-samples what you’re actually looking at, and can even switch your computer off at a deadline. It passed 700 downloads and picked up the SourceForge Rising Star Award.
2025–2026
Making software people run.
Two full-stack internships before university. At Hack the 6ix, Basil Home AI — a smart fridge running QNX RTOS on a Raspberry Pi — won Deloitte’s Best Use of AI for Green. Hack the North put us in the top 32 of 250+ teams. From there the work shifted to things meant to stay running: IsMyTripSafe, a travel-safety platform now serving over a thousand monthly users, and a fleet of 22 autonomous scrapers on Apify.
Now
Currently.
I’m in first-year computer science at McMaster. Most weeks I’m keeping Flow Arch alive, tuning self-hosted LLMs with MLX so data never leaves the machine, and writing up the hard parts on the logs page. I’m looking for a software engineering internship for Summer 2027.
Honours & results
Hack the 6ix — Winner, Deloitte “Best Use of AI for Green”
Hack the North — Top 32 finalist
SourceForge Rising Star Award — Flow Arch OS
Microsoft Sustainability Challenge — Top 5 of 172 teams
AP Computer Science A — 5/5
TKS Global Hackathon — Top 4 winner
Canada-Wide Science Fair — Bronze medalist, GreenGuardian
Get in touch.
I read email and answer every reasonable note — a co-op opportunity, a question about Flow Arch, or just a hello.
malek@malekhammoud.com