CodePapayas
Zach Wilkins-Olson
Software Engineer | OSU Class of '26
Hey there!
My name is Zach Wilkins-Olson. I had AI write this initially, but it didn't sound at all like me so I'm rewriting it. The original plan for this website was to check a box in the hiring process. As I worked on this, however, I found that I did not like being represented by a statistical language model's interpretation of who I am. Instead, I am going to treat this as a stream-of-conscience dev-blog-lite.
Currently working on an EHR migration and implementation for my employer. This is an interesting and novel project for me. The present EHR has been in place for nearly 14 years, so the amount of data that needs to be moved is quite large. Should be an interesting and educational process!
Contact
zzwo@codepapayas.com
Location
PNW | Remote
Links
What I'm Working On and What I've Done
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Pylint (Open Source Contributor)
Issue #10785 - False positive unreachable error when overload + NoReturn is used
Issue #10743 - Detect
unittest.fail()calls for assignment warning -
HIPAA | 42CFRpt2 MCP
A local-first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server utilizing hybrid vector search for regulatory compliance citations.
For this project, I wanted to improve my understanding of MCP/RAG systems as well as get more experience with word chunking/recognition systems. The architecture is such that the AI only retrieves information and never interprets it. Users can query the confidence score and matching logic that produced the answer, as well as retrieve exact text from the rules themselves.
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A-Life Challeange '25-'26 (OSU Capstone Project)
Grid-based artificial life simulation. Agents navigate a world, consume resources, reproduce, and evolve over thousands of ticks. Neural decision-making, persistent state, real-time visualizer. Built in C++17 with PostgreSQL persistence and an ImGui renderer.
This project was immensely rewarding. I worked with an excellent team and learned so much about neural networks and C++ in general. I actually prefer the visualizer for this one to the PyGame system I created in my solo project as this one uses a Perlin noise generator to simulate chemical levels and create a very pretty grid for our agents to exist in.
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Pond Spawn
Artificial life simulation where agents with unique neural network brains evolve through genetic mutation. Each agent perceives its environment, makes decisions via a feedforward network (5→8→8→8→6), and passes mutated genomes to offspring. Built with Python, PyTorch, NumPy, Pygame, and Matplotlib.
This is an ongoing project. I use this as a sort of sandbox for a prototyping ideas and testing out configurations.
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Portfolio Website
The source code for this portfolio site. A FastAPI app using Pydantic for config validation and Jinja2 for templating. Deployed on Azure App Service with CI/CD and custom domain setup.