hi, i'm Alvin

web developer and illustrator

about

links

work

contact

about

Alvin

"you can also call me Kirk. I think costco hotdogs are pretty good."

Hi, I'm Alvin and I'm a junior majoring in Computer Science at Stony Brook University. I'm working towards a career in software engineering, design, or data analytics using my skills in full-stack web development. I am always open to adding new tools and technologies to further these ends.

You can navigate my tabs to see my work or socials.

OTHER INTERESTS

  • web scraping and automation
  • responsive UI/UX and design
  • mobile development
  • art: digital painting, realism, stylized art

links

github

linkedin

work

COURSEWORK

DEVELOPMENT

DEVELOPMENT

Color Royale

An artist friend of mine showed me a color picker game, and it sent me down a rabbit hole. Turns out there's like 15 different kinds of them that test your color picker acumen in varying methods. I made this game in a day for a hackathon to consolidate most of my findings into a "definitive" color matching game with modular difficulties inspired by Osu. I'm thankful for this site since it won me the keyboard I'm typing this on.

KanjiCrypt

A custom nondeterministic encryption/decryption tool for text based off the Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese kanji, with each letter being represented by up to hundreds of kanji from a nested hashmap containing phonetic equivalents that map to the English alphabet for each language. A winning project in the HopperHacks 2025 hackathon, co-developed with a person I met by chance.

Tachyon Link Shortener

A cute link shortener; users can also register to save their shortened links. It's no hackathon winner, but I made it under similar constraints with all the full-stack cornerstones to learn the tech stack of winning teams. It was my entry point to much of Next.js's ecosystem: server components, routing, UI library, auth, form control.

Randombooru Twitter Bot

A configurable CRON script that randomly selects from tags in an image board to post daily art to twitter. I ran this for a year and saw an account get 3k followers.

BONUS ILLUSTRATION CORNER (mostly study)

the duck that I talk to

somebody

peter griffin from the show "Guy"

rem

Other dev projects:

  • This website! (The design is also from a study haha)
  • and this old site which document my older, questionable works when I first started webdev.
  • that's it for now, there's also some full-stack apps I've worked on but can't show yet :(

See more on Github

faq

how did you create the site?
  • I took most UI and design elements https://www.sharyap.com/ and recreated them by hand.
  • The site itself is essentially an observational study using my current React and CSS knowledge.
where are the other projects?
  • They exist on the old homepage or my github if you still want to see them.
  • The stuff on my old homepage is considered archived. I made a LOT of bad looking websites when learning web-dev fundamentals, and most aren't responsive.
commissions?
  • $50 and I'll try to draw anything. Just don't make me look up anything that would put me on a watchlist
would you lose?
  • nah
  • id win

contact

The easiest way to contact me is through email.

alvinzhu129@outlook.com ; this inbox is checked daily.

You can instead add "Greetings Kirk" so I know you've come from this site.