Hello, I'm Cheru!

I'm on a gap year working @ Hack Club, & I'm based in Burlington, VT.

I love:

The Rust programming language (my first!)
Music! Some of my favs are Taylor Swift & Panic! At The Disco.
Hack Club (esp. Sprig)

I don't love:

JavaScript, in principle
Over-optimization (à la Goodhart's Law)

The three guiding principles of my life (click to expand):

I have agency! So do you.

In other words- you can do anything! Pretty much every problem can be solved w/ either a lot of effort or a lot of money.

This is something I realized two summers ago, when I met some of my best friends at a hackathon in the woods - I realized (a) they were cool people because they were predisposed to do unconventional things & (b) I can just do things! The only thing that had been stopping me is the fact that I wasn't aware that I could.

I decided to leave high school early, move out, and work full-time on the things that mattered to me because it's what was best for me. It was difficult logistically, but all social systems are malleable if you push hard enough.
People are the most important thing.

I used to have this belief that engineering was the one true profession - while the work of those in operational fields would eventually be forgotten, inventions would last forever.

If you spend your life doing something that will never benefit anyone else, what's the point? Making an impact on people is the only reason we do anything- make it a positive impact. Value everyone.
We're all going to die anyways.

Maybe-unpopular take: what we do during our lives doesn't matter. "We die, then it's over / So fuck being sober" (Annika Wells).

So: Take risks! Enjoy life! The failure case is never as bad as you think it will be.
Don't be pressured to take the safest path, and don't be tempted to take the easiest path; "It’s all so meaningless, we may as well be extraordinary" (Francis Bacon).

(not-so-)FAQ:

Where are you in life?

Physically? I'm I'm based in Burlington, VT.

Professionally? I'm writing software, currently on the Sprig project.

Educationally? Technically in my senior year of high school, but working full-time. Also on that fall college apps grind 🫠.
What is your quest?

Honestly, idk. Ironically, I'm still searching for purpose.
As much as I am uncomfortable with that, I think it's mostly okay.

Conveniently (or maybe intentionally?), the things I find fun are also the skills that will probably help me in the future- so I'm just riding that train for now.
What is your favorite color?

Purple! No, blu- aaaah!
What interesting things have you done?
- I was really into FRC in high school! I programmed an autonomous robot from scratch, w/ a focus on making the code maintainable on-the-fly (gh).
- I play violin & perform in the VYO! Two summers ago, we went on concert tour in Greece.
- Ran a couple of hackathons in Vermont: Epoch VT, and then Harvest. + I've attended six more in Boston, SF, Toronto, & Waterloo.
- Spent a few months working on an open-source/affordable brain-computer interface! Currently on pause, but we've raised a few thousand $ + designed two iterations of our PCB, an ML model, & a web client (web).

Say hi at [email protected]!

I also sometimes use: GitHub, ~~Twitter~~ X