Elijah Silverman

Real-time multiplayer trivia where every answer is a wager.

• Used React 19's useOptimistic and startTransition for instant UI feedback, with a game loop built on Context and custom hooks that keeps multi-phase state in sync across concurrent clients.
• Built the real-time backend on Cloud Functions and Firestore, using atomic transactions to keep scores consistent and eliminate race conditions during simultaneous scoring.
• Wrote a typo-tolerant answer matcher using Levenshtein distance, plus error handling with exponential backoff so sessions survive unreliable networks.

Letters that travel at the speed of their carrier, from an hour by pigeon to a year by snail, tracked on a live map.

• Modeled each letter as a durable Vercel Workflow run that sleeps until arrival, then delivers and notifies, with a daily cron sweep as a safety net.
• Rendered routes on the server with d3-geo and Natural Earth data, served as cacheable SVG layers themed with CSS masks.
• Built handwritten letters two ways: photo uploads of real pages, or an image model (via AI Gateway) tracing typed text onto chosen stationery.
• Hardened it for strangers with BotID, Postgres-backed rate limits, blocking, reporting and an 18+ pen-pal directory, in five languages.

Free volunteer matchmaking for the Modern Orthodox community, with a workspace and iPhone app for the matchmakers.

• Built a scoring engine for candidate pairs (age range, religious level, Kohen rules, location, aliyah plans) with admin-tunable rules, ported to Swift so web and iOS rank identically.
• Shipped MOSwipe, a swipe and ranked-list interface for proposing matches, on the web and in a native SwiftUI app.
• Used Firestore live listeners with a multi-tab offline cache, transactional claims and handoffs, and push, email and WhatsApp reminders for volunteers.
• Added AI screening of new signups and AI match analysis through xAI's batch API.