Hello! Welcome to my portfolio website. I'm Derek Kwon and I am a recent graduate from the College of
William & Mary. I enjoy expressing myself and my imagination through code and regularly work on websites and
games as passion projects. I'm currently actively looking for a full-time position as a full-stack web developer,
data scientist, or cybersecurity engineer.
Gained security training in handling classified information (FOUO, PII, CUI) to learn how to maintain confidentiality of company data
Wrote Python scripts and used pandas library to automate cleaning, filtering, and reformatting of maritime data so that it could be properly displayed on maps on company's information sharing site
Collaborated in a team on a natural language model to assign topic tags to foreign relations articles and won 2nd place in a company-wide hack-a-thon
Worked with a partner and used RStudio to make bubble plot visualizations for African foreign relations data in a data visualization competition that the company used to gather visualizations for Africa
Scraped data from both English and Korean online sources using Selenium and BeautifulSoup to add to company's database on North Korea
Work Experience: Data Intern
Organization: MacDowell Law Group
Location: Fairfax, VA
Dates: August 5th, 2024 - September 10th, 2024
Job Type: Temporary Internship
Reference: Richard F MacDowell @ 7032772811
Responsibilities & Achievements
Used natural language processing and regular expressions in python to reformat large excel spreadsheets of client data
Compared and pinpointed differences between excel sheets using Python after the organization suffered a power outage
Acted as a consultant regarding a potential 3rd party software vendor interested in adding their AI bot to the company website
This card-flipping GUI memory game made using Java was the culmination of the object oriented programming concepts
and model-view-controller software architecture that I learned in my Intro to Software Development course.
The program listens for user input with the controller class, sends the input to the game model class which updates the internal game state, and finally updates the view class
which listens for any changes on the model class.
This project taught me that good software architecture is not only important
but is also much more pleasant to read and work with.
In my cybersecurity course, I had the opportunity to participate in several pentesting labs on a dummy vulnerable server.
I performed SQL and command injection attacks against a web server that does not sanitize input, exploited poor session management
and failure to encode output with cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery, and installed a backdoor with a vulnerable version of a third party
software and a trojan.
These penetration tests gave me a strong awareness of software and code vulnerabilities that I did not previously have, and I now
code with security in mind.
For my final project in my web programming course, I worked in a team with 6 other students to develop a virtual meeting room website
that uses Robert's Rules of Order for more organized meetings. Features include a user registration system with a profile picture upload,
a dashboard for viewing and joining committees, a committee page with the motions and members of each committee, and a chatroom for discussing each motion.
I was in charge of the backend functionality and database. I set up a cloud database with Microsoft Azure that my team could connect to and
implemented user registration and authentication, creating and joining committees, creating and voting on motions, and uploading profile pictures.
I also helped with the frontend as needed and I used CSS to style the dashboard and the chatroom. Because I was taking my cybersecurity course in the same semester,
I took the responsibility of adding prepared statements and hashing passwords with bcrypt.
The cloud database is no longer running to avoid incurring fees, but the website and code are available for viewing.
Intro to Game Development was easily one of my favorite classes in my time in college and it is also where I developed
one of my most memorable projects.
A team of scientists being dispatched to a newly discovered planet that was discovered to
be able to support life. One of the scientists brings along his beloved pet cat. Though originally brought for emotional support, the cat's role
would become much more important when the owner is bitten by one of the planet's alien mice which carry an unknown disease. The cat needs to use its
feline instincts and skills to neutralize the mice and collect the components for a cure. That is the plot of our game and final project: Cataclysm.
I worked in a team of 3 other students and I learned a lot about good object oriented design and collaborative development and version control. I was in charge of the entire game's art direction and graphics. All the sprites and animations as well as the tilemap was made by yours truly.
I also implemented the map rendering and the NPC interaction and text boxes, and made changes to the input handler to play the correct animations with the player's
input.
Here are some sprites that I am especially proud of:
Reinforcement Learning Final Project
My Reinforcement Learning course gave me the opportunity to work on a genuinely interesting project. I used
Unity's ML-Agents library to train game actors to play hide-and-seek with each other.
For my training environment, I set up multiple stages each with its own obstacle as well as a few large stages with all the obstacles combined.
The seeker agent is given a large reward whenever it makes contact with the hider agent, and the hider agent is given a small reward
for each second it avoids touching the seeker and a large penalty upon making contact with the seeker. Both agents have raycasts to see where the other is.
Here is a video of the training environment:
The agents were trained for 6,750,000 steps, which is roughly 4-5 hours. The following video compares the agents in the first 10 minutes of the training and near the end of the training:
Though not everything went according to plan, this project was still a wonderful experience that gave me greater insight into
reinforcement learning and AI in general.
My very first portfolio website was started in September 2024 and completed in November 2024 and uses HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.
As it was the first website I ever made and published, the process of making it was quite difficult as I was still learning the ins and outs of
concepts such as good HTML structure, media queries, and CSS positioning. At one point, I had to redo the entirety of my home page's HTML structure.
But errors are part of the learning process, and I take acknowledging an error as a sign that I am on the right track.
Though I will no longer update my old website, I do not want to take it down as it represents my first step into my web development journey and I am
still rather proud of it.
Personal Project: Solo Game in Development
In my spare time, I am working on a game inspired by my favorite shark: the thresher shark. These sharks use their massive
tails like whips to stun and kill small fish. They also have a face of perpetual concern and anxiousness:
I want this game to be an open-world exploration game where the shark needs to defend itself with its tail and solve puzzles to find its family. I also want to
implement a shark's ability to detect electrical fields given off by an animal's heartbeat. Using this ability, the player will be able to detect enemies approaching
in dark waters where visibility is reduced.
The project is currently in Unity, but I am considering moving over to Godot due to it being free, open-source and
arguably more suited to solo developers. Updates to my game will be reflected on my website.
