Rowan McAlpin

Student & Engineer. Open-source enthusiast.

I'm an incoming Engineering student at the University of Washington and a robotics designer & programmer based in Seattle. I specialize in Kotlin and Java, and bridging the gap between hardware systems and easy-to-use software libraries.

Selected Projects

NextFTC

NextFTC is a software library that I've written & maintained since 2022. It aims to improve the development process for programming FIRSTĀ® Tech Challenge robots by introducing an asynchronous system known as Commands.

NextFTC has been successfully used at all levels of competition including at the World Championship, and is currently used by over 90 teams across at least 9 countries. My role as the founder of NextFTC has changed over time, shifting from the sole developer to a managerial position, coordinating multiple other developers and contributors.

Competitive Robotics

Led & coordinated the design and programming of robots for two high school robotics teams: FIRST Tech Challenge team 3805 Atomic Robotics, and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team 1778 Chill Out. Achieved an average of 95.52 percentile for autonomous code across 5 years of competing with FIRST Tech Challenge, and led 1778 Chill Out through the fourth-best year in its 20-year history.

Mentored & assisted other teams with their own competitive codebases, providing support and feedback regarding optimization and assisted with debugging issues.