If you're reading this, maybe you came from the link on my resume (in which case, please hire me), or maybe you stumbled here from one of my social medias (in which case, hello).
Regardless, if you feel like chatting, it's free to contact me!
Give your hearts,
Christopher
About
Hello hello, Chris here! I'm a Software Engineer working at Ramp, a York University Computer Science alum, and former intern at Square, Facebook, Shopify, and Amazon. I was also a teaching assistant a few terms during my undergrad (and I ended up discovering I really enjoy mentoring + teaching).
Outside of work, I play video games. I've been an avid gamer since I got my first console, the Game Boy Advance SP, in 2004. I was only 5! I'm a competitive person and mainly enjoy FPS (CS:GO, Valorant) and strategy games (Fire Emblem, chess), with others sprinkled in like Smash Ultimate, Celeste, Omori, Hades, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Octopath, Triangle Strategy, Golden Sun...the list could seriously go on forever.
I also play piano and ukulele, tinker with Nintendo consoles, used to Twitch stream, and I got into hiking when I spent a summer interning in Seattle. I'll never say no to a game of pool, and I love playing board + card games. These days, living in New York has eroded my knees to dust with how much there is to do in this bustling city, so I've been getting more into fitness lately.
Fun tidbit: I played a game against chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura when he was visiting Toronto and filming content for his YouTube (had time odds + queen advantage, and still lost lol).
Education
When I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to study in university. I never took a CS course in high school, but I did have high grades in chemistry. So, I applied for chemistry, but since you can apply up to 3 programs, I also applied for CS and digital media. I'm not really sure why I did, considering I knew nothing about tech, but since I was always surrounded by tech, computers, gaming consoles, etc. growing up, it just felt right. Applying to university wasn't a case of "this is what I liked the most", it was more "this is what I disliked the least". I call it a blessing that I miraculously found myself in tech and that my interests ended up deeply aligning with this field.
I got accepted into all the programs I applied for, and while initially leaning towards studying chemistry, I still felt compelled to pick CS. I had no idea what a CS major entailed and I've never even written a single line of code prior, but something was telling me to pursue it. To this day, I couldn't even tell you why I picked a CS major, I just felt right to me.
I had a rough start to university. Everyone around me was excelling while I couldn't even figure out how to create an HTML file. I didn't know what an IDE was or how to use Git. I felt so frustrated and lost, I often thought about dropping out of the program.
{ insert a long story about how I finally got it together, was very fortunate to meet the right people at the right time, had amazing people who were patient and understanding with me, peers who carried me through school when I ran out of willpower to do it myself, mentors who were rough around the edges but genuinely wanted to see me excel... }
Fast forward to today, and I'm so enamoured with technology. Programming is modern day wizardry; developers can sit down at a computer and create value for people out of thin air. I'm sure this part of me will wear out someday, but for now, I'll enjoy living in my naivety.
Work Experience
I've done many internships over the last years: Amazon, Shopify, Facebook, Square, etcetera. Fresh out of graduation, I'm proud to announce the first company I'll be working for on a full-time basis is at Ramp.
I packed up my life in Toronto and moved to New York City for this opportunity. Not to be one of those people who drink the corporate kool-aid, but Ramp is the best company I've ever worked for.
The work is fun, challenging, and impactful. I'm surrounded by some of the smartest and kindest people I've met in my career, and in an environment that promotes so much growth, independence, and personal development.
Ramp is great and my coworkers are amazing; I hope to be here for a good number of years.
My Winter 2023 internship; January - April 2023.
Yeah, life in the tech world has been kind of crazy from June 2022 to now (currently writing this February 2023). Layoffs and a lot of uncertainty in the world with job security. I applied to go back to school for a masters in September, and I was applying to full time positions mainly, but decided to apply to a few intern applications just for fun. I got an offer to work for Square for the winter, and decided to take it.
Since I graduated from my undergrad in December 2022, I had time to kill for a few months while I figure out what my future might look like. I decided might as well intern, and I made some good friends and a lot of memories this term.
I developed a solution to make our mountains of data more searchable friendly by incorporating Elasticsearch + GraphQL.
My Summer 2022 internship; May - August 2022.
First and foremost, this was a company I've coveted since I was a first year student. I get that students can intern at these tech titans, but I never thought it would be me. I flopped miserably in my first few years of school, how could I ever hope to work here?
Well, I ended up working here (thanks to many people + having the stars align perfectly for me in so many scenarios). I had an amazing time with amazing people - this was my first in person internship (since COVID made my prior ones remote), and also first time being in Seattle!
I worked on the Borderline and Exploratory Technology team under the Content Integrity organization. I built infrastructure that ingests user profiles during the content curation pipeline, which aids in our confidence when we decide to delete something on our platforms.
My Fall 2021 internship; September - December 2021.
I went to their careers open house when I was a second year student and I thought their offices were beautiful, right in the heart of downtown Toronto. I had a few friends work here before, and they told me how great it was. I applied to them a bunch of times, got a bunch of rejections (4x), but I finally cracked it. Unfortunately, it was remote though.
I worked on the Customers Profile team where I made internal tools and helped to build out more of their GraphQL APIs.
My Summer 2021 internship; May - August 2021.
My first big tech internship. I was really nervous for this one, because I really wanted to prove to myself that I'm capable of being a good software engineer. I had the option of working hybrid in Vancouver, or remotely in Toronto. I chose to be remote (which I still deeply regret to this day).
I worked on the AWS S3 Replication team. We wanted a way to see what features were used most, least, etc. on AWS S3 buckets, so I build a backend that aggregated these statistics. I also prototyped a tool to compare AWS SQS queues which is used to aid in software versioning and validation.
My Fall 2020 internship; September - December 2020.
My first internship. I remember I went to my first hackathon, Hack the North 2019, and I met some really talented (and maybe a bit showoff-y) people who told me about their summers spent in California, New York, etc. interning at tech companies. At the time, I didn't even know what an internship was, but I told myself I'd get my first internship that following summer. 200+ apps later, learning how to do LeetCode for the first time, resume review workshops, finding inspiration for projects to create, so many tears and rejections, but we finally did it.
I worked on the Cloud Engagements team where I helped to improve our web apps. I also learned that I really dislike frontend development (and would go on to do backend development for my next internships).
I was a TA for EECS1012 (Intro to Web Development) for the summer 2020 semester (May - August 2020) and later a TA for EECS1015 (Intro to Computing with Python) for the fall 2022 semester (September - December 2022).
These are the first courses CS students will take at York University. I found it kind of ironic that years prior I was so frustrated in my lectures thinking, "why does none of it make sense to me?" and then later on I would go on to help teach it.
I'm certain freshman me would be very proud of how I ended up today.
Projects
Fire Emblem is my favourite video game franchise. I've wanted to make a lot of Fire Emblem related projects, but there's a lot of data across the series of 14 video games. To streamline things, I thought it would be nice to make an API to put all that information together.
Yet another Discord bot. This one tracks the number of times a user says 'good morning' in a server. Sounds simple, but it was a decent amount of work (making streak functionality, a leaderboard, etcetera). It was a fun one day project.
My small implementation of making a Google Drive clone. Users can upload, view, and delete files. I made this as a way to practice playing with Flask and making API endpoints, and it ended up a great learning experience (fun fact, I actually got a job at Shopify because of this project).
In lieu of me graduating, I had a lot of knowledge I wanted to pass down to younger students. A lot of people on the daily would message me asking me for advice, so I wrote a website to detail everything I learned in my years in school. Advice for courses, how to optimize your schedules, looking for internships, and more.
Another Discord bot. This one is arguably the one I put the most amount of hours in. I wanted a Discord bot that could centralize all my actions to one platform, because of the amount of context switching I was doing daily. From Twitter to Reddit to Google Calendar and more, I wrote a bunch of commands that could do everything for me in the Discord client itself. Commands to pull tweets, Reddit feeds, a to do list, and more.
Simple Python script that takes the top stories on the r/news subreddit and tweets them every few hours. I knew I wanted to make something using the Twitter API, and I was learning Python, so I made a project to break into the language.
The first side project I ever made. I was learning how to code and someone suggested making something with the Discord API (I didn't even know what an API was). I had a running gag with my friends about how much something would weigh in chicken nuggets, so I made a bot that converted weight into number of chicken nuggets. We've come a long way from chicken nugget bot.