Cody Sims

cody-sims.com

AI-Powered Portfolio & Travel Platform

Create one useful home for a portfolio, travel journal, recipes, and long-form content without turning each feature into a disconnected product.

Outcome: A production platform that supports four content domains, nine documented projects, and a reusable admin workflow.

Recipe Collection

AI-Powered Recipe Manager & Generator

Recipe sites often bury the useful content, while manually rewriting recipes makes a personal collection difficult to maintain.

Outcome: Reduced recipe capture from a manual transcription task to a guided import and review flow.

Video Description Generator

AI-Powered Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

Most video lacks audio description, excluding blind and low-vision viewers from visual context that sighted audiences receive automatically.

Outcome: Produced a working Llama 4 Hackathon prototype that turns uploaded video into timed, customizable audio description.

Rhode Island Maps

Interactive Pathfinding Application

A full-stack web application similar to Google Maps, built specifically for Rhode Island. Connected a React.js frontend with a Java backend server to create an interactive mapping experience capable of pathfinding using Dijkstra's algorithm. Utilizes a SQL database containing over 1 million road segments to calculate optimal routes between any two points in the state. Features include real-time route visualization, turn-by-turn directions, and efficient database queries for fast response times.

Molecular Variational Autoencoder

Deep Learning for Drug Discovery

Implemented a Tensorflow version of the Molecular VAE paper for automated molecular design. Trained on a dataset of 250,000 molecular graphs from the ZINC database, this deep learning variational autoencoder learns to encode molecular structures into a continuous latent space, enabling the generation of novel drug-like molecules. The model facilitates faster drug development by allowing researchers to explore chemical space more efficiently and generate molecules with desired properties.

Vunmo

Multithreaded Payment Backend

Developed a small-scale multithreaded backend server capable of receiving and transferring imaginary funds, similar to Venmo. Built in C and C++, the server handles concurrent client connections using threading, implements secure transaction processing, and maintains consistent account balances across multiple simultaneous operations. Features include user authentication, transaction history, and thread-safe data structures for handling race conditions.

Iterative Design

UX Case Study

A comprehensive UX case study utilizing iterative design principles and extensive user research to create a Point-Of-Sale System for restaurants. The project involved conducting user interviews, creating detailed personas, developing low-fidelity wireframes that evolved into high-fidelity Figma prototypes, and performing usability testing with real users. Multiple design iterations were made based on feedback to optimize the user experience for both restaurant staff and customers.

Pokemon Battle Simulator

Turn-based Combat Game

A passion project recreating the battle system from my favorite childhood game. This full-featured Pokemon battle simulator includes all 151 original Pokemon with accurate base stats, 16 type matchups with proper effectiveness calculations, and over 700 different moves with their authentic effects. Built using object-oriented design principles in Java with a JavaFX interface, the project involved scraping Pokemon data from Bulbapedia using Python and BeautifulSoup to ensure accuracy.

Pokemon Team Builder

Interactive Team Planner

A vanilla JavaScript web application for building and analyzing Pokemon teams, showcasing DOM manipulation and state management without any frameworks. Features include searching and filtering Pokemon, adding them to your team, analyzing type coverage and weaknesses, and saving teams locally. Integrates with the PokeAPI to fetch real Pokemon data including stats, types, and sprites. Built as an exercise in understanding core web technologies before learning modern frameworks.