Portfolio Edition Grambling, Louisiana · Est. 2024
Where Code Meets Canvas Design Engineer · CS Student
Break Through Tech AI Fellow

The Maker's Times

Where Code Meets Canvas

"Where Code
Meets Canvas"

The Maker's Times

Design. Engineer. Make.
Portfolio Edition

Weather: High innovation, low friction. Full report on Home Page. Price: One Collaboration

HI, I'M SHALOM

Take a glimpse into a design engineer's world

Read the story
Victorian etching: two figures pulling a rope between code and design worlds
Portrait of Shalom Donga
Engineer Who Designs Designer Who Codes

Inside the portfolio of a design engineer spanning AI frameworks, iOS apps, and enterprise solutions

Hi, I’m Shalom, a design engineer 👋

What does that mean?

It makes more sense with a little context. I started in creative work. Writing, visual art, choir. Then I moved into code, and it felt like the same discipline expressed through a different medium. The goal never changed. It was always about shaping ideas into something others can experience.

That perspective stayed with me. I do not separate design from engineering. I approach both as one continuous process of thinking, building, and refining.

The products I create reflect that. They are intentional in how they feel and rigorous in how they function.

Design and code work side by side

Experience Wire

Latest Headlines
Summer 2026

UX Designer

Tiffany & Co.

Joining the Digital Omni and Client team to deliver white glove digital experiences for one of the world’s most historic luxury houses, where heritage craftsmanship continues to shape the digital work.

Incoming
Spring 2026

Student Consultant

BVCC × Ford Motor Company

One of 16 students selected nationally to consult directly with Ford on current UXR internal pain point. Working in a team of four to research, design, and present solutions to Ford executives.

Fall 2025

AI Studio Fellow

Break Through Tech × Anote

Built a multilingual LLM evaluation system across four languages and 9,322 data chunks. Discovered that a free local model outperformed Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini. The finding reached Anote's CEO and a partner in Japan.

Summer 2025

Frontend Development Intern

CORE Futures Lab

Designed and built the UI for an AI speech therapy platform serving children in under-resourced communities. Two connected apps, one for clinicians and one for families. Shipped ahead of schedule and supported a successful VC raise.

Classifieds

Skills
Engineering

tools & infrastructure

Python JavaScript Flutter Swift React HTML / CSS Flask Firebase Supabase Node.js FastAPI Git
AI / ML

data systems

scikit-learn SHAP RAG Systems BLEU / BERTScore NLP XGBoost Model Evaluation Random Forest
Design

creative practice

Figma Wireframing UX Research Adobe Creative Cloud Vercel v0 Info Architecture Prototyping

Editorial

Fun Facts About Me
Anya from Spy × Family
Serious About
Not Being Serious
Handmade yarn keychains

FIRST MICRO BUSINESS

Handmade yarn keychains.

— ShaDo Crafts —

Open sketchbook

Sketchbooks built the eye,
The IDE inherited it.

Flag icons Flag icons

LANGUAGES

English, Ndebele, Zulu

four others

THE SHIFT

Figure walking from sketchbook to IDE
Church and community building cityscape

DESIGN WORK

Graphics created for churches and community organizations.

A Maker's Journey

Press Archive

Featured Projects
UXCode
AI/MLLinguistics

VocalPrint

A living, community-built voice museum designed to preserve endangered languages and close the AI listening gap. First-place winner at the Kirchner HBCU Pitch Competition.

UXCode
iOSEducation

ClassSync

Streamlined attendance tracking for Grambling State, rethinking the student check-in flow from the ground up. Adopted by faculty in the same semester it shipped.

UX
MobileTransit

UniRide

Redesigned campus transportation for students without reliable car access, mapping pain points through user research and iterative prototyping across six sprint cycles.

Code
AI/MLNLP

Multilingual LLM Eval

Evaluated four LLMs across four languages with 9,322 Wikipedia chunks. Open-weight models outperformed commercial alternatives on BERTScore despite lower exact-match scores.

UX
ConsultingAI

InsightCuts

AI-assisted research insight video tool developed for WGM Studios during the BVCC × Ford consulting engagement. Delivered strategy, logo, and stakeholder feasibility analysis.

Code
ML ResearchEcology

ALAN Bird Migration

Investigated artificial light at night's impact on bird migration patterns using ensemble methods. Achieved AUC of 0.847 with XGBoost and Random Forest on the AI4ALL research track.