I build things people can tap. Data science at UNSW, founder of Tampkit and a regular at Sydney hackathons.
I'm Aayan. I study data science at UNSW, and I like building things people can actually touch. A stamp that sits on a café counter. An email tool that knows who "they" is. A chess game where the knight eats the queen. Most of it started at a hackathon at 2am.
I learn fastest with a deadline breathing down my neck, so a lot of my weekends go to hackathons. This year that turned into two first places, a third, a solo run to the finals and a wooden spoon I'm weirdly proud of. Right now most of my energy goes into Tampkit, my café loyalty startup.
About meEvery one of these was built in a weekend or less. Hover a card for the story and click it to see the project.
48 hours in an Airbnb with Parham and Rohith. For the first 24 we had nothing, just idea after idea and demo after failed demo. Then it clicked: learn a language by watching Netflix. We pitched it at the Artesian office to a panel of VCs and won.
Shark Tank style, run by UNSW AI Society, UTS Tech Society and Crucible Ventures. We didn't walk in with slides alone. The week before, we walked into local cafés with a prototype and asked owners if they'd actually use it. The judges cared about that more than anything on screen.
Real chess, every rule enforced, except each piece gets a kill move. The knight eats things. The king throws a bomb.
Solo, 24 hours, against 21 teams of three to five people.
A camera that turns your photo into exactly 1,000 words and no image. Built with Walie to see how bad UX could get before people gave up. They lasted longer than we expected.
Tampkit is loyalty for independent cafés. A tamper-shaped stamp sits on the counter, the barista taps it on your phone, and your stamp card opens with no app and no sign-up. Swipe the deck to see the pitch. Or skip the reading and drag the stamp onto the phone.
Drag the stamp onto the phone. Or just tap it.
Second year. Lots of C, R and statistics. Things I've enjoyed most so far: data structures, forecasting in R, and anything that ends with a model I can actually explain.
I took a big, messy spreadsheet of Australian bird traits and turned it into Canopy Atlas, a public database for 1,011 species. Anyone signed in can fix a value, and every edit keeps who changed it, when and why, so there's a full audit trail. I wrote it so a curious member of the public can follow it and a researcher still gets the detail they need.
Getting kids across the road safely every morning and afternoon. Reliability and paying attention, every single shift.
Teaching kids to swim. Turns out explaining something simply to a nervous six-year-old is good practice for pitching to judges.
Fibre optics research in the photonics department, on a project linked with Sydney Water. My first time in a real lab.
Designed N-able, a visitor app and a staff responder app that help people with disability feel safe at concerts and festivals.
I grew up in Sydney taking gadgets apart to see how they worked. Now I mostly take ideas apart instead.
Before uni it was robotics (I was robotics team leader and competed in FIRST Robotics), chess (I was chess captain, which explains Battle Chess), Lego stop-motion films and a couple of tiny businesses that never went anywhere. None of it was planned. I just kept following whatever I couldn't stop thinking about.
Uni has been the same, just faster. Hackathons taught me that a clear idea beats a fast build, and that you should talk to customers before you write a single line of code. That's the whole reason Tampkit exists. I walked into cafés, asked owners if they'd use it, and only then started building properly.
Truth is, I don't have the five-year plan sorted, and I think that's fine for now. I want to try a lot of different streams before I pick one. Here's what's on the list:
If you're working on something in any of those areas, I'd love to hear about it. Coffee's on me, which is fitting.
Mondays are my coffee-chat days. Pick one and Calendly opens on it.