whoami
I'm a University of Waterloo grad currently working at Google as anSRE-SWE. I work within the Product Security area, which owns the production side of most cryptographic security services at Google, some of which average almost half a billion requests per second globally. We pride ourselves on our operational excellence and constantly engineer solutions to further improve it.
With 4+ years of experience professionally building software, I've been personally responsible for leading multi-faceted projects spanning data design, distributed computing, hybrid cloud setups, mesh networking, API design, auth flows and performance optimization.
Before that, I studied Applied Maths and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where I took a special interest in High Performance Computing (HPC) and its use for solving Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) problems. I've run water flow simulations on supercomputer clusters at National Research Council Canada and developed distributed computing code in C++ using the Message Passing Interface (MPI).
Personally, I'm a strong advocate of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS), contributing to projects such as Helix (my primary text editor) and NixOS as well as writing and maintaining my own projects like Termautomaton and Kinesin. You can also find me active on forums like the NixOS Discourse.
Joined Google as a Software Developer
I join Google as a Software Developer in Site Reliability (SRE-SWE), working on multiple cryptographic services that underpin security across the company.
Successfully Launched Hybrid Cloud Project
Contributing to the engineering team's goal of increasing efficiency and reducing overhead, I dedicate my time to building a server rack in the office. Using NixOS, Ansible and custom-chosen hardware (including an OPNsense router), I set up, deploy and manage an on-prem cluster. I support the engineering team in standardizing and deploying dev and staging environments for all projects on-prem, reducing our monthly costs.
Developed a Custom PostgreSQL Queue Library in a Day
As part of a hackathon day, I decide to investigate the use of Postgres as an ACID-compliant, at-most-once message queue for job scheduling. After writing a proof-of-concept that can handle thousands of messages per second, I turn it into a cleaned-up library that we go on to use across multiple projects, avoiding the need to deploy RabbitMQ or similar systems.
Joined Strata Research as a Software Engineer
I get hired by Strata Research, based in Kitchener, Ontario, right after graduating. My first assigned project is the Turnstone client, a big-data analytics platform that transportation organizations like SDOT and the City of Berkeley use to manage and regulate on-street parking.
Bachelor's Degree - University of Waterloo
I'm awarded my Bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Having focused on numerical methods courses and their applications to physics, I come out highly proficient in high-performance numerical programming in low-level languages like C++ and Fortran.
Presented my Thesis to the Department of Applied Mathematics
As one of the first people in the department to write highly-parallel C++ code for an undergraduate thesis, I successfully present and defend my work, along with a 46-page paper.
Bought my First Domain and VPS
Having great difficulty finding good introductory resources for my niche of numerical programming, I decide to pull the trigger and start a blog so I can hopefully help anyone else who finds themselves in the same situation I was in.
Software Developer - Applied Maths Department, University of Waterloo
After it becomes clear that my thesis project will prove useful beyond the thesis itself, my supervisor hires me as a software developer at the lab so I can spend more time improving and maintaining the C++ project.
About the Blog
I started this blog at the beginning of 2022 as a way to channel my passion for teaching into a hobby project. The topics are loosely centered around my technical interests: high performance computing (HPC), optimization methods, differential equations and more. Some examples of my previous work include solving Navier-Stokes on a non-regular 3D grid, testing novel optimization methods in machine learning, and dabbling in category theory.
How I Built This
This website was entirely built by yours truly. Stop it you, with your common sense; this isn't GitHub Pages, Hugo, 11ty or any other templating static site generator. Instead, I chose to useAstroas the framework base. The CSS and design are done with TailwindCSS, and the CMS is an orchestra of Astro's content tools and markdown plugins, withKaTeXfor the math equations andFontsourcefor the fonts.