If you're here, then you likely already know that I'm a software developer. If you're still reading this, then you probably want to know more about me.
I started programming when I was in high school, but didn't really get into the meat of it until I was in university. I finished my bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Toronto in 2013. Sometime around 2nd year, I decided that I wanted to specialize in artificial intelligence - computational linguistics, to be more specific. In 4th year, I decided (like every developer does at some point) that I wanted to pursue a career in game development instead. I don't think it's hard to see why; there's always something to be saif about telling a story and seeing it come to life in front of you. Around the same time, I realized that AI wans't something I wanted to build a career around. Yes, it was interesting, but it was still a very academic area of computer science and I wanted to spend my career making things, not performing research and writing papers.
After graduating, I returned to University of Toronto to pursue a master's degree. Unlike most other programs, which were aimed at propelling graduate students into a PhD program, this one placed more emphasis on communication and entrepreneurship and tried to teach us how to turn our ideas into businesses. Most of the graduate courses I took focused on innovative UI ideas - how to take the nebulous concept of "interact with a computer" and find interesting (and hopefully efficient) ways to do that or else find ways to make existing tools more efficient.
The final part of my master's degree was an internship at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, where I worked on a number of projects, until I was finally assigned to the HHPS project - a project meant to encourage healthcare providers in hospitals to follow governmanet-mandated handwashing practices. The hope was that doing so would save lives by reducing the number of infections transmitted by healthecare providers.
After the end of my internship and my graduation, I secured a position as an application developer at Synaptive Medical, a company that was looking to revolutionize neurosurgery by making advances in the technologies available to neurosurgeons.
After working at Synaptive for about 18 months, I moved to Shopify, where I was a front-end developer on the Plus Support team, where I provided support for our enterprise-level merchants. After a year in that role, I became a squad lead, where I supervised a group of 7 people across 3 time zones.
About 18 months into that role, I realized that as much as I enjoy working with people and seeing people grow and start to achieve their potential, I found technical problems to be much more interesting. Shortly afterwards, I moved to the Shopify Fulfillment Network, where I joined the Warehouse team. This team was dissolved shortly after I joined and I was reassigned to the Internal Clients team, where I helped develop and maintain Mission Control, the primary tool that our operations team uses.
After the successful launch of Mission Control, the team was dissolved and I joined the Pricing & Billing team, which owns the code that charges merchants for order fulfillments and for inventory management. In this team, I took on a mentoring role and, in addition to the projects I've worked on, I've onboarded a number of new hires and given a number of presentations about my learnings on the team.
In my spare time, I'm pursuing a number of personal projects. When I'm not working on one of those, I'm usually either out with friends, gaming, cooking, baking, kickboxing, gardening, or spending time with my dogs, Nova and Stella.
