yacoub kahkajian

Gen Z likes civics. Gen Z loves tech. Gen Z hates using most civic tech. The Youth Civic Hub prides itself in being the exception. A partnership between the Office of the New York City Public Advocate, YVote, New Voters, and over 50 nonprofit partners, the Youth Civic Hub is a LinkedIn-like platform focused on civic opportunities and educational resources that youth actually want to use. The Youth Civic Hub launched in May 2024, with immediate coverage from local publications such as WNYC and Slashdot. That same summer, I interned as a product maanager to introduce new features and polish that built upon that initial momentum.

Princeton pride persists even over the summer! The Daily Princetonian commissioned this project to celebrate Princeton's excellent showing at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Along with the colorful graphics and animations that have come to define web projects at The 'Prince', some elements on the page also updated live as the Olympics progressed. The schedule at the top of the page would automatically jump to the event occurring at the user's current time and the recent stories panel would automatically parse a JSON of all the newest accomplishments of our Olympian Tigers.

A project commemorating Princeton's Class of 1999 deserves fittingly nostalgic aesthetics. Some clever CSS was used to give this project the same look and feel as Windows 9x. I also drew the pixel art icons on the desktop and in the taskbar of this operating system from an alternate timeline. So retro!

Worked on adding platform-specific polish, finding the sources of crashes that didn't throw errors, addressing tester feedback, and adding new features before The Daily Princetonian's big debut on the Google Play Store!

With the Graphics section of The Daily Princetonian in a bind, the Web Design and Development team took the helm of creating a new theme for their 2023 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging report. I focused on animating the colorful gradient background and the animation that greets the user at the top of each page in the report.

A special issue of The Daily Princetonian highlighting the diverse themes of the articles which were published that week — featuring an interactive cheese wheel! Users can drag the wheel as it smoothly responds to the position of their input, then let it go and watch it spin before the page jumps to a preview of the article it landed on.

Winner of the New Jersey Press Association 2023-24 College Newspaper Contest Web Project award!

A special issue of The Daily Princetonian exploring the various groups on campus who have a stake in Princeton's future. I encouraged the web design section to move away from hard-coding HTML elements within their projects during the development of this issue, programming a script that automatically clones template components with relevant information from a JSON file using vanilla JavaScript.

A new platform for The Daily Princetonian's interactive content that enables journalists to effortlessly create news quizzes based on their articles, while readers can take them and easily share their results using a fun and intuitive interface. I served as the lead full stack developer during this project's development, responsible for the frontend application and the GUIs that interface with the backend quiz database.

I was asked to create a special website for The Daily Princetonian that highlighted their articles and multimedia about mental health on Princeton's campus using a papery style. I converted the header bitmap to a responsive layout for the landing page, which allows the website to be viewed on a variety of devices without compromising its design. I also reworked the article carousel to make scrolling horizontally more natural on touchscreen devices.

I authored an article for The Daily Princetonian’s data section that examines trends in the dinners served by each of Princeton’s undergraduate dining halls. I automated the data-gathering process by using menu archives courtesy of The Princetonian’s Campus app and a Python script that parses the stored JSON file and categorizes each of the dishes. I am currently working on a version of this article that focuses on vegetarian and vegan options.

The Daily Princetonian’s Frontend Web team was tasked to apply Jon Bois’ Scorigami concept to Princeton’s football scores in a similar vein to Andrew Merriman’s NFL Scorigami grid. I was responsible for the backend of this project, parsing the spreadsheet of scores the Sports team had on hand into a format that D3.js would be compatible with. I also took it upon myself to make the grid easier to explore on mobile devices by implementing a sticky vertical axis and making the chart scroll separately from the rest of the page.

I used Java and the Processing graphics library to develop a fun way to visualize any given video by taking the average color of each frame and displaying them in a stack. The result is a ray of colors reminiscent of Charlie Clark’s The Colors of Motion prints.

A gamified brainstorming app I led the backend development of during Google’s 2022 Computer Science Summer Institute. I designed it for use in large group environments with one host computer and multiple audience members pitching ideas that are then inputted into a text box, with a final voting round that highlights the best ideas from the session.

A light web app I developed for adding captions to GIFs using JavaScript, HTML canvases, and the Gifler library by Bill Dwyer. Contains options for custom colors and font families, as well as automatic line wrapping.

My take on the infinitely replayable Wordle genre. Includes a customizable world list, dark mode, a manifest with PWA support, and fun little animations.