Josh Charpentier

Barry the Bench Maker is my most recent project. Originally, I created a basic version of this game in high school with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I wanted to garner C++ experience so I revisited it after all this time, while giving it a fresh coat of paint. Barry the Bench Maker is a full-featured terminal RPG. Learning a new language at this point is largely syntactical. I got familiar with C++ for the first time, and really enjoyed taking my time to work on a game. The creativity fostered by this game, even if only existing in a terminal, made it a joy to create. Click play to give it a try!

Thought

I am nearing the completion of this new website redesign! A few things to highlight: now things are in more of a feed, and as you may notice, there are thoughts like these that pop up now and again! I think a lot about computer science and the tech space and realized it would be fun to have a place to put some of these thoughts. What better place than my own website? The feed isn't strictly chronological - more aimed at balancing thoughts with projects. Use the filter to see one or the other. The "All" page also may sometimes have a featured section like it does now! Check out my latest project and first game: Barry the Bench Maker! (you can play it right on this website). And lastly, as always, we have my Github, LinkedIn, and Resume links in the bottom right. Thanks for stopping by and feel free to reach out on LinkedIn!

Like BreakIt and MadCourses, CoverMe came from a personal need. When my school advisor suggested applying to roughly 100 jobs just to hear back from a handful, I knew I needed a way to stand out while staying efficient. Cover letters were a potential differentiator but crafting unique ones for each posting was a long process. CoverMe feeds your resume, a scraped job description, and optional writing samples into an LLM to generate a first draft directly in an editable interface. No prompting, no switching tools. Users can choose between running models locally via Ollama or through OpenRouter in the cloud.

MadCourses is a tool I built in my final months of college. I was thinking back on what would have made my course selection experience easier. I knew I wanted to study computer science since elementary school, but which courses would actually build the skills employers wanted? I would have loved a tool that matched job skills to UW-Madison courses directly, so I built one. Users enter skills and get ranked course recommendations. Under the hood is a RAG system: course descriptions are embedded and stored in Vercel, and Hugging Face encodes the skill input at query time to find the closest matches via cosine similarity.

I've always believed in building with purpose; the strongest motivation I have to create something is when I can solve a problem for both myself and others. BreakIt was born when my dad pointed out an anxious habit of mine: picking at my nails. I thought, there has to be a way to track this and stay accountable. It was my first React Native app, which gave me hands-on insight into cross-platform, full-stack development. I learned much about state management and app deployment thanks to this project.