Featured Projects and Experiences

Rest of World

Worked on restofworld.org site, including bug fixes, new Wordpress page/post types, Google analytics, Apple News, internal CMS tools, and custom story treatments.

Own Up

Developed marketing landing pages and interactive tools, such as a tool to compare rates across lenders and a loan afforability calculator.

Thegrep Command Line Tool

Created command line tool in Vim to scan text for pattern matching a user-imputed regular expression, similar to ‘egrep’.

Generative AI Party Planner

Extended Partiful's Party Genie tool using AI to come up with more customized and infinite event ideas when user selects and inputs tags.

Associated Press elections web scraping

Researched and verified election results from county and state websites for primaries and general elections on election nights, using internal tool and Selenium to automatically update elections results for elections API.

Voting in AZ and Navajo Nation

Site visualizing voter turnout and ballot rejection rates in response to Navajo Nation lawsuit over mail-in ballot deadlines. Won 2nd place in Mapbox Elections Mapping Challenge: Best Untold Story.

Bluebonnet Data

Conducted data research on internet deserts, radio advertisements, and local businesses for voter outreach for Sam Edney's NC-HD113 campaign. Also worked with migrating subscriber data to Salesforce for the Texas Observer.

RTC Membership Directory and Visualization

Researched and developed a searchable directory and data visualizations of Women of Rewriting the Code members for their Rewrite Your Summer program. Won 3rd place of all fellow projects.

Learning Game & Human Computer Interaction @ CMU

Coded learning games and quizzes and conducted literature reviews of existing ed-tech research for Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute.

COMP426 Twitter App

Recreated Twitter web app using HTML/CSS and backend server of tweets from classmates to load, create, and interact with tweets.

Java Paint App

Image editor using Java GUI including drawing functionality, adjustments to image, and pixel inspector. Extended app to create a movable 9-piece puzzle.

Redirected Walking in Virtual Reality

Created VR coin-collecting game with Unity. Experimented with HCI concepts like redirected walking and AI and tools like 3D audio and 3D animation.

Also see: my TED talk ideas Twitter bot, my research on staff salaries at UNC by department compared to number of majors, a data presentation I gave for a class about trends in the Twitter hashtag #StayWoke and a project about opinion mining and sentiment analysis in climate change tweets (yes, I'm addicted to Twitter). For even more, visit my Github.

About Me

Hey there! My name is Lily and I'm interested in a lot of different things. Here are a few of them:

Journalism and Storytelling📝

Though I'm not reporting as much as I once did, I owe most of my skillsets to what student newspapers and internships have taught me. As a journalist, I covered activism, politics, food and internet culture. I was especially interested in longform storytelling, which led me to join and become editor-in-chief of Synapse Magainze, a longform magazine at UNC, and pitch my own articles on student activism to various outlets. I also interned at UNC's Southern Oral History Center, where I interviewed and conducted research on American Indian Activists at UNC.

Technology 🤖

After taking Intro to Computer Science my second semester of college, I was instantly hooked, spending countless hours working on problem sets and extra credit. I love problem solving and the way that my computer science courses challenged me to think in new ways. To me, coding feels like magic—nowhere else can I transform an idea into tangible, interactive programs through just a few lines of text. I love figuring out the different ways of solving a problem and understanding how a computer works, from C to assembly language to binary to circuits and transistors.

Since then, I've combined my interests in journalism and technology as a front end developer at Rest of World and previously as a developer and product manager at UNC’s Reese Innovation Lab, using technology to create products that improve storytelling. I also write scripts to collect elections results from state and county websites for the Associated Press' automated web scraping team and fact check the results we collect on election nights.

Education/Community/Mentorship 🎓

I owe everything I have to the people who have supported me—I owe my interests in journalism and computer science to two incredible professors who believed in me. My journalism professor continuously invested time and care into editing my articles, once even writing an entire page of feedback, longer than my original article.

At UNC, I worked to build community through various student organizations. I was heavily involved in the Asian American community, where I helped advocate for an Asian American studies program and an Asian American Center (which was created in Fall 2020!) and organized a conference on the complexity of Asian American identities for college students in North Carolina's Triangle region.

In the summer of 2018, I worked in educational policy across different organizations and cities through Teach for America's Accelerate Fellowship. Through that fellowship, I was able to learn about problems in the education system in rural and urban areas and different ways TFA alum were working to fix them. Through Microsoft TEALS, I currently volunteer as a teaching assistant for an intro high school computer science class in Manhattan.

Misc. 🏠

Besides the above, I enjoy texting my friends, reading, listening to podcasts, running, watching TikToks, posting BeReals, and attempting to make recipes I find on the internet. If you'd like to speak about anything above or if you'd like to tell me about some of your interests, reach out at loulilyh[at]gmail.com or find me on my social media below.

Lily in Upstate New York
Me, admiring ice cream in upstate New York.

© 2024, Built by Lily Lou