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.
Projects
-
FIRST Robotics Competition
2025 – PresentProgramming lead on a nationally competitive FRC team (Hawaiian Kids Robotics). 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.
-
2024 – Present
Founded 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.
-
2026 – Present
Founded and authored a free 26-chapter course modeled on learncpp.com that teaches Rust from first principles through ownership, traits, generics, async, smart pointers, and unsafe/FFI. Every code example is machine-verified to compile and run against the current Rust toolchain before publication.
-
2023 – Present
Co-founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on STEM educational equity, and built the systems that distributed custom PCB kits free to low-income households.
-
2021 - 2022
Built a Discord bot that delivers on-demand weather forecasts and current conditions to servers, pulling live data from a weather API.
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.