Jacques Ludik
Experience
AfriPaw →
Developed a smart web app for AfriPaw, a non-profit focused on improving the lives of rural pets. The app, built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Prisma, features user authentication, data capture, and querying. It also sends emails and SMS to users, volunteers, and dog owners, utilizing a PostgreSQL database hosted by Neon.tech and front-end hosted on Vercel, with Tailwind CSS and tRPC for backend communication.
Cryptology →
Developing a cryptology web app that uses TypeScript and React Native to accompany a book written by several professors. The app allows users to perform cryptographic cipher calculations, including encryption, decryption, and modular operations for Block, Stream, and Public Key ciphers (e.g. RSA and ElGamal). It also supports cryptanalysis techniques such as letter frequency analysis and Kasiki analysis. Users can save and retrieve their work for later use.
Data Engineering Student
I am a 4th-year data engineering student at Stellenbosch University, studying within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering department. My curriculum includes subjects such as Engineering Mathematics, Data Science, E-design and Computer Sciences. I've worked on various projects, such as recreating Space Invaders in Java, parallelizing the game Othello in C using pragma directives, building a Python web scraper for GitHub, and implementing convolutional neural networks in Python with PyTorch.
Data Engineering Intern
I interned for 3 months at SpatialEdge, an AI company in Stellenbosch, where I worked on building profitable Forex trading algorithms using Python. I implemented anomaly detection in one algorithm by training an Autoencoder model using the Keras library. Additionally, I researched state-of-the-art software technologies for forecasting and optimizing ATM cash replenishment.
Blockchain developer
I developed an arbitrage crypto flash loan trading bot that leverages decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum blockchain to exploit price discrepancies. The foundation of the system is a Solidity-based smart contract that I deployed to the Ethereum mainnet. To ensure reliability, I thoroughly tested the contract using the Hardhat framework, employing both a forked mainnet environment and the Sepolia test network for comprehensive simulations. The bot itself, written in TypeScript, continuously scans for arbitrage opportunities across decentralized exchanges on Ethereum. When a profitable opportunity arises, the bot interacts with the smart contract to execute trades. It secures funding for these swaps through a flash loan obtained from the Balancer protocol, allowing it to maximize returns without requiring much upfront capital.