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My thoughts on software development, design, and life.

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Physical Media Still Rocks

June 8, 2026

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GuidesTechnical

Makefiles

December 29, 2024

A brief guide to GNU's make. ~~Check it out~~ ~~here~~~~!~~ It’s since been migrated here! I used to use make often in small-to-medium sized code snippets in CPSC 213 ("Introduction to Computer Systems") at UBC as a part of the teaching team. Hopefully this guide can serve students well and provide some clarity on this somewhat arcane build tool! Makefiles 🐐 A guide to Makefiles. Designed to be useful for students I taught at the University of British Columbia (UBC), but also hopefully more bro...

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Blog

A decade of scrap booking

November 17, 2024

In my first year of high school, I had the luxury of spending an all-inclusive weekend in Lacombe, Alberta. In case you’re not familiar, Lacombe is a city in central Alberta, 125 kilometers south of Edmonton and home of the Len Thompson Manufacturing Plant (that part, of course, you already knew). In 2017, it was home to the Alberta Student Leadership Conference. The website is still up, here. I went, starry eyed, to learn how to lead. And learn I did! (My whole leadership experience in high sch...

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ProjectTechnical

RapViz

July 7, 2024

See your bars broken down right in the browser. Powered by Spotify, Genius, and Google Cloud. Check out the GitHub repository here! Background There are loads of videos online that inspired this project. Take a look at Genius' version, Check The Rhyme, or Vox's, Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time. These videos get millions, and I mean millions of hits online. Why? Well, it's fun! And it's cool. The basic concept is that rap lyrics are "broken down" and the rhyming groups are hi...

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Blog

I’m bad at flying

October 29, 2023

šŸ“… Despite the edited date, this post was actually written and published on October 29th, 2023. Story time. I'm bad at flying. But I don't mean the act of flying, as a pilot. I mean as a passenger. How can you be bad at packing your bags, going to the airport, filing through security, and hopping on a plane? Great question! I'm not sure, but after reading this, I think you'll be inclined to agree. Right now, I'm sitting in the Victoria airport after trying to board a short-haul flight to my home...

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BlogTechnical

Day One: My internship at Amazon

August 23, 2022

šŸ“… Despite the edited date, this post was actually written and published on August 23rd, 2022. It's been about two weeks since I wrapped up my position as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) Intern at Amazon, and I wanted to reflect on my time there this summer. I often get asked about the full end-to-end experience of my time at Amazon, so before I get into what I worked on and what I learned, I'll first do a full re-wind to my initial application. Working towards a FAANG offer In recruiting ...

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BlogTechnical

The rescinded internship offer playbook

July 18, 2022

šŸ“… Despite the edited date, this post was actually written and published on July 17th, 2022. This upcoming fall, I was set on making a number of fairly major life changes. Firstly, I was about to move from one of the world's largest technology companies to a cryptocurrency start-up. Secondly, I was going to pack my bags and move from Canada to Palo Alto, California. And thirdly, I was going to do it all basically on my own. As of Thursday, I've been thrown back to square zero. Due to pressures i...

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Blog

Fill your cup

July 3, 2022

šŸ“… Despite the edited date, this post was actually written and published on July 3rd, 2022. Every single day, you start out as an empty cup. Humbling, right? Beyond your laundry list of personal to-dos, slog of tasks at work, and mountain of messages to which you need to respond, you actually need to focus on just one thing each day. And that's filling your cup. The inspiration I came across an idea loosely linked to this end product from YouTuber Ali Abdaal. His rather simple, but genius sugges...

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ProjectTechnicalSchool

Predicting Credit Card Defaults

April 19, 2022

The following blog post was written for the final homework submission of CPSC 330, UBC's "Applied Machine Learning" course. In the course, my partner Max and I got a hands-on introduction to machine learning with Python via sklearn. hw6.pdf Problem Defaulting on a credit card payment is a challenging situation for all those involved. The individual who defaulted is tasked with rebuilding their credit score, and the issuer is laden with the debt. Ideally, a financial institution could predict whe...

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ProjectTechnicalSchool

jCite

June 5, 2021

Create and manage your citations without all the headaches! Background This project was made for CPSC 210, a UBC second-year course focused on software construction. The course uses Java, and likewise this project was made using Java and JavaFX for the UI. I asked my girlfriend if she had any project ideas, and she mentioned she struggled keeping track of citations for her assignments, so I wanted to build a tool that could meet her needs. I felt the exact same feeling when I wrote my 4,000 word...

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