Bach Tran
Hi, I am Bach!

About me

Computer Science Major @ University of Pennsylvania

Hi! I am Bach Tran. I care deeply about developing software that brings joy to people. To that end, I have been honing my passion for full-stack engineering and building products that can benefit those around me. I am avid learner, loves to collaborate with others and always in for a challenge to deepen my understanding of the world!
I have worked at Addepar,Bezel and Homebase, where I delved into API development, high-performance computing, UI infrastructure, caching, testing, SEO and data tooling. Really enjoyed the work and learned a lot on what is like to ship full-stack high-quality software with speed. More informaton on what work/impact has been made can be viewed in my resume.
At school, I help teach CIS3500: Software Design/Engineering and develop student-focused products to make office hours easier with ohq.io, campus news more accessible with the DP and planning courses faster with Penn Courses LLM. I also built software for nonprofits to manage data more efficiently with Hack4Impact. On the side, I like to build projects that help me learn new technologies or enrich my knowledge with familiar ones.
Outside of work, I love kickboxing 🥊, photography 📸, RPG games 👾 and cats 🐈.

💻 Projects

Some of the things I have built!

Penn Courses LLM

An LLM to help student search and plan their courses easier. 1,700+ queries processed

At Penn, we have a big course directory that is sometimes hard to search through, especially given the complex nature of planning courses for the semester. Penn Courses LLM seeks to simplify this complexity by offering a chat interface to answer any course-related questions a student might have.
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Vercel KV
Python
Flask
Cohere APIs

Robin AI

Healthcare Fraud Detection, powered with AI. 2nd place winner at Penn Generative AI Hackathon. 2024 Venture Lab Startup Challenge Finalist (previously Semifinalist)

The US experienced $100B annual loss to Medicare and MedicaidFraud. At the same time, the process for detecing such fraud uses either manual or rule-based systems. Robin seeks to introduce ML to healthcare fraud detection, to catch fraud within minutes instead of days. My main role at Robin is to build out our product experience, including the dashboard UI panel and APIs for dataset processing and model inference.
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Supabase
FastAPI
Python
Google Cloud

H1B Visa Data Center

H1B Sponsorship Rates and Salaries visualized across the USA states, cities, employers and industries

H1B Sponsorship Data is quite few and far between across the web and there are not a lot of applications that help visualize a birds-eye view of the H1B landscape in the USA. With over 582,000 individuals living in the US on a H-1B visa and 85,000 new visas being issued per year, there is a significant need for reliable and consolidated resources to help these individuals find their next home. As part of CIS5500: Database, we created an application that can visualize a bulk of H1B Visa related statistics (over 5 million data points).
React
TypeScript
Express.js
MySQL
SQL
AWS

Gesture Bot

Control motors with only gestures. Powered by an embedded TinyML model deployed on Arduino with <256kb memory

Wheelchairs can be hard/clunky for disabled people to operate. As part of ESE3600: TinyML, we ntroduce a prototype of a bot that can move based on gestures to lift this burden completely. The user will be given a remote and depending on the path the user draws using the remote, gesture bot can follow the direction of the path
C++
Arduino
Python
Google Colab

StepUP DB - Sustainability index of ecommerce stores

StepUp scrapes the web for ecommerce stores along with relevant sustainability scores and visualize it across a map

This is a fun project I did to help out a high schooler with her research project into sustainbility stores. We collected data from a few directory websites of stores with their sustainable ratings, aggregate them into a single database and visualize them across the map. I had the chance to experiement with a serverless architecture (Prisma) with this app!
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Prisma
MongoDB
Python
Selenium
Google Cloud

Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia (AVP) Referrals Tracking System

A dashboard for AVP to manage their referrals more efficiently

AVP, a victim service agency based in West Philadelphia, was seeking a solution to simplify their referrals tracking system that was spreadout over multiple Google Sheets and Forms. As part of Hack4Impact, I was leading a team to build out a solution to simplify the referrals system into 1 unified platform. Here, I built some of the dashboard UI components and APIs for tracking referrals updates. I also spent a lot of time talking with our clients at AVP and getting to know the nonprofit landscape in Philly!
React
TypeScript
Express.js
MongoDB

Office Hours Queue (ohq.io)

Office hours management platform powered by real-time queue management, analytics and more. Integrated into 100+ courses at Penn

OHQ revolutionizes office hours by replacing physical lines and sign-up sheets with a virtual queue system. It lets students join with a query and estimates wait times, alerting them via SMS when their turn is up, along with updates and staff announcements. For staff, it provides queue management, performance tracking, and review tools. As a backend team member at OHQ, I had a blast working with Python and Django, developing APIs for analytics, TA reviews, and enhancing existing ones, scaling OHQ to help students and university admin have a better time with OH!
Python
Django
Next.js
React
TypeScript

The Daily Pennsylvanian Inc

Independent student media organization of the University of Pennsylvania

I joined The DP (Daily Pennsylvanian) as director of engineering, responsible for developing/maintaining technology infrastructure. Over my time, I was able to develop a few services for the DP such as the DP+ app (contributions to UI as well as a GraphQL API to query articles from the website into the app), Narrative AI integration (making AI-generated audio available for all articles), dropcap (a service track the top 10 most viewed articles within a month) and content-rec (a service used to recommend relevant articles based on vector similarity search)
React
React Native
JavaScript
GraphQL
Redis
Google Cloud
PHP

Penn Courses Graph

A graph of all Penn Courses, connected via prereqs and vector similarity

This project is a visualization of the Penn Courses Directory, connected by their relationship in whether they are prereqs to each other or whether their content is similar. The relationships are then processe into a graph-like format and visualized via a web UI with filter options, entirely with vis-react.
React
JavaScript
Java

InstaLite

An Instagram clone, powered with a distributed recommendation. chat and search engine

InstaLite is an Instagram clone, backed by functionalities like social graph management, chat, and dynamic post ranking, post management, hashtagging, commenting and liking.
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Kafka
PostgreSQL
Java
Spark

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