Salvo Bonsma
Studying Computer Science at the University of Washington, focused on robotics software, real-time systems, and full-stack development
Hi, I'm Salvo (Salvatore) Bonsma. I build robotics software and fast, simple web apps. Below are a few things I've made; you can also read the blog or get in touch.
Experience
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FIRST Robotics Competition
2022 – PresentProgramming lead on nationally competitive FRC Team 359 (Hawaiian Kids); also on Teams 4180 and 9442. Rearchitected the robot software around industry-standard patterns; built a physics-based simulation environment and a logging + log-replay pipeline that reproduces bugs against recorded match data, a real-time pub/sub live-tuning system, a five-camera fiducial-marker pose-estimation pipeline fused with wheel-encoder odometry, and modular autonomous routines with a custom point-to-point motion controller.
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Pulse
2024 – PresentFounded and built Pulse, a real-time web platform for the competitive robotics community, using Next.js and WebSockets. Owned the full product lifecycle end-to-end: UI/UX design, front-end application logic, back-end services, and deployment.
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InnovatED
2023 – PresentCo-founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on STEM educational equity, and built the systems that distributed custom PCB logic kits free to low-income households.
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Discord Weather Bot
2021 – 2022Built a Discord bot that delivers on-demand weather forecasts and current conditions to servers, pulling live data from a weather API.
Featured Blogs
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Building a Wii Remote for the Nintendo Switch 2
Jul 2026I combined the Wii's motion controls with the Switch 2's new mouse mode by building a gyro remote out of two ESP32s that the console sees as an ordinary USB mouse.
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Replacing Vercel with an Old Laptop
Jul 2026I pulled my apps off Vercel, Railway, and Cloudflare onto an old laptop running Dokploy, with a Cloudflare tunnel doing all the routing. Here's how the setup works and what Dokploy is still missing.
About
I'm studying computer science at the University of Washington (B.S. expected 2028), focused on robotics software, real-time systems, and full-stack development. I've been the lead software contributor on a nationally competitive FRC team and like building tools that make hard things feel simple.