Lincoln Maxwell

I'm a CS student in the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I've been interested in technology since I joined Scratch, MIT's block coding community, in May 2015 when I was 7 years old.

Nowadays, I'm interested in using technology to create community, to help people reach their full potential, and to generally help people. But some projects I work on don't have a fancy title; I still love to build just for fun, whether it's a realtime, multiplayer Mario Kart replica in Scratch or a handcrafted Minecraft mod loader.

What I've done: internationally recognized NHD research (twice), received over 30 awards, saved local organizations ~$300K, grew a 2-week custom Minecraft server network to 100 players on 2 Raspberry Pis, contributed to Cloudflare.

What I'm doing: building out technical infrastructure at the Needham Community Council.

Featured Posts

How I built Grantly (and open sourcing it)

— I'm deciding to open source Grantly, an AI-native grant discovery and matching platform.

I built a Minecraft economy server from scratch

— Including the plugins themselves, the server network, the ORM, and the deployment pipeline.

Predicting college acceptances using statistical and neural methods

— College decisions are not predictable. But let's give it a shot anyway.

An IP address is worth 1,000 words

— The few forgettable bytes that is an IP address have implications greater than we remind ourselves, and it can tell us stories much greater than we think of at first.

Optimizing engagement on a Minecraft server using behavioral psychology

— How I engineered a Minecraft survival server that keeps players engaged for hours by combining smart infrastructure choices with behavioral psychology and incentive design.

 See all posts →
Resume
Experience
Needham Community Council Inc., Software Engineer Intern 2024 - 2026
  • - Automated volunteer hour tracking for 200+ users by building a barcode-scanning check-in kiosk with Wails, Go, and Svelte that looks up volunteers and syncs their hours straight into the nonprofit's eTapestry donor database through the eTapestry API, giving leadership the volunteer totals they need to win grants.
  • - Made the volunteer system accessible from any device by rebuilding it on Cloudflare Workers and PWAs using SvelteKit, removing the need to install desktop software and allowing automatic updates via CI/CD builds.
  • - Expanded the nonprofit's medical equipment lending program by building a second kiosk using Wails and Go that lets community members borrow canes, walkers, and other equipment, logging every loan automatically to eTapestry through its API.
  • - Saved staff and the executive director hours of manual work each month by building a tool that merges reports from eTapestry, Lyft, and SignUpGenius into a single clean spreadsheet.
  • - Continuously iterated and incorporated feedback on each utility based on direction from the executive director.
Palitra 3D LLC., Software Engineer Intern 2025
  • - Recovered 2 TB of critical company data worth $200K+ after a storage failure by writing recovery software in Python and running it across a four-node Raspberry Pi cluster to rescue contracts, CAD files, and sales records from a failing RAID array.
  • - Protected the company against future data loss by migrating the recovered files into Dropbox cloud storage through the Dropbox REST API, replacing the failed on-site hardware.
Projects
Grantly
  • - Catalogued 64,500+ grants worth $1.2T+ in available funding by building a TypeScript and SvelteKit system that automatically crawls the web for grant pages, reads them, and organizes them into a searchable Postgres database with no manual work, deployed on serverless Cloudflare Workers and Docker Swarm.
  • - Trained a logistic regression model and finetuned a DistilBERT model on two hand-labeled datasets using Python, Sklearn, HuggingFace, and OnnxRuntime to cut wasted AI processing costs before pages reached the expensive extraction step with 80%+ accuracy.
  • - Matched nonprofits to the right grants in under a second by creating a RAG embedding pipeline using Postgres pgvector, then using an LLM to rank each grant against an organization's mission, location, and focus area.
  • - Tested with organizations across Massachusetts, Maine, and California.
Economic Minecraft Survival Server
  • - Kept a Minecraft server network online 99%+ of the time for 100+ players by designing a distributed Docker Swarm architecture deployed across a self-hosted 2x Raspberry Pi cluster.
  • - Developed two Java plugins to sync player authentication and economy data with a Postgres database, ensuring consistency across the server cluster.
  • - Built a full in-game economy with balances, payments, and shops backed by Postgres, with thread-safe transactions to handle concurrent player actions.
  • - Reduced Postgres server workload by 99%+ by bulk loading an in-memory cache at startup, keeping land protection fast as the server scaled.
  • - Automated deployments using GitHub Actions, cutting build time by 40%, and enabled cross-platform play between desktop, web, and mobile Minecraft clients.
Chip
  • - Built a full-stack Stack Overflow-style platform where anyone can attach a cryptocurrency reward to a question, using SvelteKit, TypeScript, Drizzle ORM, and SQLite via Cloudflare D1 serverless database on Cloudflare Workers to serve it quickly to users worldwide.
  • - Automated reward payouts by giving each question its own crypto wallet through the Circle API and automatically sending the full reward on the Polygon network to the best answer with no manual handling.
  • - Let users fund and claim rewards safely by supporting both managed and self-custody wallet options while keeping all sensitive keys secure on the server, gated behind GitHub sign-in.
JAR Remapper
  • - Earned 17 GitHub stars through organic adoption in the Minecraft developer community by publishing a Java library that translates program names between the major formats developers use.
  • - Made the library easy to use by designing a clean builder interface that lets developers translate a program in under 10 lines of code.
  • - Enabled easier debugging of translated programs by preserving the detailed naming information that most competing tools throw away.
Java Obfuscator
  • - Protected Java software from being copied or reverse-engineered by building a tool that scrambles a program's inner workings across 14 steps while keeping it fully functional.
  • - Made the tool easy to adopt by packaging it as a Gradle plugin, web service, or standalone CLI so developers could add this protection as a normal step in their existing Java build process.
  • - Built a web service in Go that lets developers protect their software remotely with live progress updates, without installing anything locally, and published every module through GitLab.
Recognition
National History Day, Group Website
  • - International Outstanding Entry Award (150 of 500,000+)
  • - International Finalist (500 of 500,000+)
  • - 2nd Place @ States
  • - 1st Place @ Regionals
  • - Teacher Award for Best Project of the Year
  • - Teacher Award for Best Website of the Year
Hackathons
  • - 1st Place @ See You Later, Hackulator 2
  • - 2nd Place @ Hack@BUA for 'Noter'
  • - 2nd Place @ AMSA Code Bash
FIRST Tech Challenge Competition
  • - 1st Place State-Level Control Award (Best in Massachusetts)
  • - Winning Alliance Captain
  • - 2nd Place Motivate Award
  • - 3rd Place Inspire Award
  • - Think Award (2x)
  • - Club Inspire Award (Highest Club Honor)
  • - Club Software Architect Award (2x)
  • - Club Leadership Award
  • - Club Rookie Award
  • - Club Motivate Award
  • - Club Inspire Award
  • - Club Compass Award
  • - Club Four Years Award
Miscellaneous
  • - Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Computing Award
  • - MetroWest Nonprofit Valuable Player Award, "All Star" Student Volunteer
  • - Don Brock Award for Excellence in Math
  • - Needham High School Academic Excellence Award
  • - Needham High School Parent-Teacher Council Scholarship Awardee
  • - Massachusetts Koplik Certificate of Mastery Scholarship Awardee
  • - OpenAssistant Research Contributor
  • - Featured in the news for AI advocacy
Education
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Commonwealth Honors College · BS Computer Science · Incoming Fall 2026
Northeastern University
Cybersecurity & Privacy Summer Program · 1st Place in Program-Wide CTF
Needham High School
GPA: 4/4 · SAT Math: 800/800 · SAT English: 750/800 · APs: Comp Sci A, Statistics, English Language, U.S. History, Calculus BC, Physics C: Mech, Physics C: E&M, Mandarin, Psychology