Cover Story · No. 01

Listening for signal in everything.

A first-class software engineer who reverse-engineered Shazam for fun, ships production APIs on weeknights, and still believes a well-built spreadsheet can change a logistics company.

By The Editors · Photographs by Available on request

1^st

Class Honours

65+

Discord Servers

90pp

Dissertation

FIG. 01H. Patel · Spring '26

From the editor — on the subject.

Pp. 02—03 · Essay

Heet Patel is a software engineer working at the seam where rigorous research meets the unglamorous business of getting work done. He graduated First Class from Nottingham Trent in 2025, took home the department's Best Mathematics Project Award for a dissertation on audio fingerprinting, and spent both his summers turning warehouse spreadsheets into systems people actually used.

What sets the work apart is its insistence on usefulness. The same engineer who applied advanced spectral analysis to recreate Shazam will also write a Python script that quietly saves a procurement team several hours a week. He treats Excel macros and TensorFlow with equal seriousness — which tool wins is a question of fit, never fashion.

He builds in public when he can. LintData, a pandas validation library, ships to PyPI via GitHub Actions. Serenity, a Discord moderation bot written in async Python, runs across more than sixty-five servers without his daily attention. Routine Grid, in development, is a habit-tracking platform with a Django REST backend and a NextJS frontend modelled on GitHub's contribution graph.

If there is a thread, it is this: take a problem, find its signal, and serve it back to people in the simplest interface that respects their time. In September 2026 he joins Checkout.com's Technology Graduate scheme.

The ledger — selected works.

Pp. 04—07 · Portfolio

№ 01 — Featured

Reverse-engineering Shazam, by hand.

Audio · Signal Processing · Fourier · Python · NextJS

A 90-page mathematics dissertation that took Shazam apart and rebuilt it. Spectrograms generated with Librosa, fingerprints hashed with bespoke spectral peak logic, audio matching in under eight seconds on a laptop. Awarded the department's Best Mathematics Project.

Stack: Python · Librosa · NumPy · NextJS · SQLAward: Best Maths Project, NTUYear: 2025

Custom signal-processing pipeline: STFT → constellation map → combinatorial hashing.
Sub-8-second matching against a local fingerprint store on commodity hardware.
Full-stack delivery with a Next.js front end on top of optimised SQL hash storage.

№ 02

Routine Grid

Habits · Django REST · NextJS · JWT

A habit and time-tracking platform with a production-grade REST backend, JWT auth, Pydantic validation, and a calendar UI inspired by GitHub contributions.

Status: In developmentStack: Django REST · Next.js

Pydantic-based validation across all write endpoints.
Token rotation + refresh flow for long-lived web sessions.
Calendar visualisation modelled on GitHub's contribution graph.

№ 03

LintData

Open Source · Pandas · CI/CD · PyPI

A one-line pandas validator that flags missing rows, duplicates, and quiet anomalies before they reach a model. Released to PyPI through a GitHub Actions pipeline.

License: MITDistribution: PyPI

Composable validation rules with sensible defaults.
Anomaly detection over numeric and categorical columns.
Reproducible release pipeline, version-pinned via tags.

№ 04

Serenity

Discord · Async Python · Hikari · SQLite

A self-tuning moderation bot quietly running across 65+ Discord communities. Async by default, with rate-aware spam control and per-server config persisted to SQLite.

Servers: 65+Stack: Hikari · SQLite

Per-channel adaptive rate limiting, no human in the loop.
Async event-loop architecture handling thousands of messages.
SQLite-backed configuration with per-guild overrides.

№ 05 — Research

Computer vision for album art.

CNN · Transfer Learning · Spotify · Conversational AI

Retrained ResNet50 and EfficientNetB0 to classify album artwork, then wired the predictions into a Spotify-aware conversational agent backed by SQLite.

Accuracy: ~70% (ensembled)

Transfer learning on a curated cover-art dataset.
Ensemble of CNN backbones to lift top-1 accuracy.
Inference loop joined with the Spotify Web API.

№ 06 — Research

Big-data accident analytics.

Hadoop · MapReduce · Distributed · Clustering

Multi-node Hadoop cluster built to crunch national vehicular accident data; MapReduce jobs cluster incidents by severity to surface where intervention matters most.

Scale: Multi-node cluster

Cluster orchestration and HDFS data layout from scratch.
MapReduce severity-clustering pipeline.

Field notes — work in the wild.

P. 08 · Reportage

Sept
2026

Technology Graduate, Checkout.com London · Fintech Incoming

Reserved. The forthcoming chapter.

Joining the Checkout.com Technology Graduate scheme in September 2026 to work on payments infrastructure at scale. Field notes from the desk will be filed in a forthcoming issue.

Summer
2024

Data Analyst Intern, Future Centre Storage & DistributionAylesbury · Logistics

Built an Excel-based tracking dashboard (Macros, Pivots, V/X-Lookup) that shaved fulfilment delay and surfaced bottlenecks across international logistics.
Worked the floor with procurement, sales and warehouse — turned dashboard observations into operating decisions.
Automated reporting across Sheets, Excel and Teams so management could move on data, not anecdote.

Summer
2023

Data Analyst Intern, Astute HealthcareAylesbury · Pharma · M&A

Briefed the executive team on European pharma market dynamics during the acquisition of DocPharm GmbH.
Wrote a Python scraper against Belgium's SAM medicine database to enrich procurement with live competitor pricing.
Designed a German↔English inventory pipeline using cosine similarity on expanded acronyms — eliminating manual translation overhead.

The toolkit — instruments at hand.

P. 09 · Index

Languages

Python advanced
TypeScript fluent
JavaScript fluent
SQL fluent
Java working
VBA working

ML / AI

TensorFlow core
Keras core
CNNs research
NLP working
Spectral analysis distinction
CRISP-DM method

Data & Backend

FastAPI core
Django REST core
PostgreSQL core
Hadoop / MapReduce research
Pandas / NumPy daily
Matplotlib / Seaborn daily

Operate & Ship

Git daily
GitHub Actions CI/CD
JWT / Auth flows core
RESTful design core
Async Python core
Excel / VBA weapon

Honours roll & recognition.

P. 10 · Awards

Award · 2025

Best Mathematics Project

Department of Mathematics, Nottingham Trent University — for the Shazam audio-fingerprinting dissertation.

Degree · 2025

First Class Honours

BSc Data Science — top classification across machine learning, big data and statistical analysis.

Service · 2023–25

Course Representative

Elected by the Data Science and Computer Science (with Maths) cohorts to advocate for curriculum changes.