roberthq.com
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i ship products, and reverse-engineer the rest.

hi, i'm robert vassallo, 19. spent this summer shipping agentic systems into production at daisy, now back at uni in leeds. been building since 12 ↳: ios apps on the store, hackathon wins, paid reverse-engineering of commercial software.

Malta → Leeds Open to '27 internships GitHub LinkedIn
SWE intern @ a startup backed by Stripe's founders
6× hackathon award winner
£3k Spark grant
Best student company nationally @ 17
Paid to crack commercial code protection @ 15
Robert Vassallo
Robert pitching Nautilo solo to a full room at the EUDIS Defence Hackathon, Portugal
EUDIS '26
Part 01 / 02
WORK
02internship · jun to aug '26

this summer, i shipped to production.

  • billions of pounds of produce a year run through daisy's platform
  • 8.3× faster client onboarding, after i rewrote their front end

ten weeks at daisy, a dublin startup backed by stripe's founders. i worked across the front end and the AI, and three things i built are in production.

the first thing every user sees is the assistant i proposed and built, on every customer's front page. it already knows what's on screen, at zero inference cost, so you just ask. it answers from the real data and shows every step it took.

Role
swe intern · front end + AI
Stack
typescript · next.js · llm agents
Shipped
3 systems to production
Impact
8.3× faster onboarding
Reach
100% of clients
Date
jun to aug 2026
the assistant i built, open beside a supply chart on daisy's landing screen

daisy's landing screen. figures redacted.

02.Agroundingin production

a numeric grounding system for their agent.

Problem
the agent could state numbers that weren't in the data.
Fix
it now points at numbers instead of writing them. each one is traced to its source when the page renders.
Result
anything it can't trace gets flagged. hover any figure to see where it came from.
an answer where each figure is underlined and linked to the data point it came from

hover any figure to see its source.

02.Bthe front endin production

i unified their UI.

8.3×Faster to onboard
a new client
Problem
every customer's screens were their own code, so one change meant editing every copy by hand.
Fix
i audited the debt, proposed a rebuild, and rewrote the entire front end solo: 27 shared building blocks, one settings file per customer.
Result
it's now the team's architecture, deployed to 100% of clients.
03awards2024 to now

trophy cabinet.

2026 · Oct
EUDIS Defence Hackathon · Portugal
2nd overall
€3,500
nautilo · mothership · EU Defence Innovation Scheme
2026 · Jun
NVIDIA Hack for Impact
1st
6mo ElevenLabs Scale
argus · elevenlabs challenge · local on dgx spark
2026 · May
AI in the Box hackathon
Prize
£250
concordia · multi-agent runtime
2026 · Feb
UCL × PGIM Real Estate hackathon
2nd
£1,500
ghostplot · embodied carbon
2026 · Jan
Hyperliquid × Encode
2nd + 3rd
£2,250
hypergate · li.fi track + community
2025 · Nov
DurHack 2025 · Marshall Wace
1st · track
iPad + Pen + duffel
bridging worlds · 1 of 67 teams
2025
Spark grant
Selected
£3,000
biteswipe · 150+ applicants
2024
JA Europe · Malta finals
Best co.
€2,600 profit
our company, remind ↗ · 400 sales · age 17
2024
JA ISCF · Latvia (intl)
Best sales team
vs 40 teams
team award, with remind · times of malta ↗
Team Nautilo on stage with the second-place cheque at the EUDIS Defence Hackathon 2026
Nautilo · EUDIS '26
Robert on stage with the other winners under the NVIDIA logo at Hack for Impact, London
ARGUS · NVIDIA '26
Durhack team with iPads
DurHack · Nov '25
the projects ↓
Part 02 / 02
PERSONAL
PROJECTS
04ARGUShackathon · Jun '26

the operating system for city traffic.

reads ~780 live traffic cameras on one nvidia dgx spark and flags congestion about 12 minutes before the official feed. i built the ui, the approval flow and the voice agent.

1st · elevenlabs challenge, nvidia hack for impact

dgx spark · yolo11x · nemotron · elevenlabs · with alex pivovarov, jeffrey chang

05BiteSwipeown app · Jan '26
BiteSwipe recipe swipe screen BiteSwipe weekly meal planner BiteSwipe auto-generated shopping list

a cooking app, on the app store.

swipe recipes, plan the week, get the shopping list made for you. designed and built solo, front to back.

£3k spark grant, from 150+ applicants

flutter · supabase · app store ↗

06Open Waterside project · May '26

an fft ocean, in the browser.

tessendorf's method, the one film studios use, rebuilt in three.js. the waves fold into foam and the boat floats on them. i first tried this with sine waves at thirteen.

three.js · webgl · try it ↗ · github ↗

07PyArmorpaid disclosure · Feb '23

i cracked a commercial code-protector at fifteen.

recovered a pyarmor-protected app's full source by patching cpython's marshal loader. the app's owner paid for the write-up.