Natalie Ko-Ferrigno

natalie.kf@outlook.com

07734 246427


I am currently a third year student, studying a Masters in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Southampton. I have a strong interest in code, and I feel confident in Python, and I am continuing to develop my Rust skills with the more advanced features of the language.


Projects

Mandelbrot set renderer

This project involved making a renderer for the Mandelbrot set using various methods. Each way I did it had unique benefits, such as Python's low barrier to entry, Rust's vastly improved speed, or the addition of MPFR vastly increasing how much I can render. Through doing this project, I now feel significantly more confident in Rust and I have learned a lot about areas I didn't expect, like the limitations of floating point numbers and one way to work around it.

I still have many more ambitions for this project; in the future I hope to start learning how to use WGPU to make the renderer run faster by taking advantage of hardware that may be better suited to the task. I expect that this will not be easy, but I also expect that I will learn many more things that I don't expect and that the challenges will be exciting. I still have more ideas, like rendering animations like many on YouTube do, but these will have to wait for some time in the future.

I have written in more detail about how to make a very basic Mandelbrot set renderer and I have talked in more detail about the problems I encountered here on my website. For now this is unfinished, but making that page has been a good learning experience for how to improve my web design skills.


Reusing a computer as a server

When my last laptop no longer suited my requirements, as it was too heavy and getting slow, I replaced it with my (refurblished) MacBook Pro 2014. After this, the laptop sat unused for a while. Then, I decided I wanted to look into hosting a website on it. Since then, I have used it for many uses, primarily a file sharing server. This is both through Samba and Jellyfin, to backup my files and stream music. In addition to this, I have written some code to monitor the uptime so I can make it more reliable.

In addition to a file server, it hosts this website. This is all handwritten HTML and CSS, because I haven't needed to use the server for anything that would need CSS. I am using nginx as my server and while my configuration is quite simple, I can fairly easily change it when necessary. I also run game servers from this, mostly Minecraft and Factorio. At one point, Minecraft was limited by the bandwidth of the HDD that the laptop came with, so I purchased an adapter and a SATA SSD so I could take advantage of faster storage. In addition to this, I was able to get a 8GB DDR4 SODIMM to increase the capacity of my RAM.

So far, this server is more powerful than I need, which is good because it gives me plenty of resources to learn at an incredibly low price.

I have outlined more projects on my CV, which is avaliable on request.


Acedemic acheivements

I passed my first year of University with a 2:2, with my strongest module as Systems, Design and Computing. I enjoyed it, but since starting my second year, I am enjoying having modules that are more specific to what I want to do in the future.

I passed my second year with a 2:1, with very high marks in group projects, one of which being building a multirotor. For this projects, I did all of the electronics and built a gimbal.

For my A-Levels, I Acheived A*, A, B in Maths, Physics and German respectively. In addition to this, I acheived an A* in my EPQ, which was written on an overview of aircraft design.