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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.

For now, I don't have a lot to add. I am finishing up my last 3 months at Oregon State University (current as of April 26), and am considering my options as I enter this new chapter of my career. I am currently working on a game idea: An isometric detective sim. There's a lot more to it, but that's for another post. Go Beavs!

Contact

Email

zzwo@codepapayas.com

Location

PNW | Remote

What I'm Working On and What I've Done

  • 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.

    Pond Spawn GitHub

  • Pylint (Open Source Contributor)

    Contributed to the core static analysis engine of Pylint to improve inference accuracy. Engineered logic to correctly handle the control flow of unittest.TestCase.fail(), preventing false-positive 'used-before-assignment' errors. Additionally, refined the inference of pathlib.Path objects to ensure Pylint correctly identifies attributes on joined paths.

    Issue #10785 - False positive unreachable error when overload + NoReturn is used

    Issue #10743 - Detect unittest.fail() calls for assignment warning

  • 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.

    Website Source Code