yo wsp, I'm

Eli Özcan. 👋

I write code, break it, and call that engineering.

I'm a teen software engineer passionate about hacking the world around us. I'm currently focused on Hack Club , programming for my school's robotics team, and experimenting with side projects.

See selected work GitHub

How I think

I keep track of the moments that change how I think.

Software engineering has been my thing since I was around seven, but it never stayed only software. It turned into robotics, aviation, CAD, agricultural mechanics, PLTW, golf, and a lot of taking things apart just to understand the order inside them.

MechatronicsCADRustNext.jsReactTypeScriptAI/MLRoboticsAviationGolfHardwareNixOSC/C++Cloudflare

I tinker first

Cameras, controllers, remotes, laptops, codebases, VEX robots. If I want to know why it works, I usually have to risk breaking it.

Half mechanic, half electrician

Mechatronics fits because machines and electronics both feel like parts of the same thing. Losing either one would feel like leaving half of me behind.

I learn better when I teach

I help people a lot, sometimes too much, but it feels wrong not to. Explaining something makes me understand it for real.

I use AI on purpose

AI agents are a tool to learn with, not a substitute for talent. It takes real taste and skill to command one well anyways.

Public proof points

A few receipts, because documentation matters.

I am trying to get better at tracking everything instead of hoping I remember it later. These are the public ones: science fair results, Hack Club shipping, and old Q&A traces from when I was figuring things out in public.

California Science & Engineering Fair

1st place in Cognitive Science, Junior Division, for "Unraveling AI," a project about AI detection and how easily humans can be fooled by AI-written essays.

Kern County Regional Science Fair

1st place in Cognitive Science before state, then advanced from the California fair to nationals.

Hack Club Summer of Making

Public build log with 8 projects, 100+ devlogs, 8 ships, hundreds of hours of coding time, and a Summer of Making win.

Instagram @eli.ozcan GitHub @elijah629

Selected work

Projects, experiments, and stuff I probably learned by breaking first.

Some are polished, some are jokes that got too real, and some are just me chasing a question until it turns into a repo. That is usually the best way I learn.