Welcome!
About Myself
Hi there 👋! I'm Nicholas, but you can call me Nick. I'm a passionate developer with a drive to realize great solutions. Currently, I am pursuing a double degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, in my 4th year at the University of Toronto. I am interested in pursuing continued studies, researching deep learning and transformers further.
Outside of studies, I play guitar, piano, and alto saxophone. I also have an interest in modern Japanese culture (from music and food to games and anime). Apart from a bunch of hobbies, I like to stay educated on maintaining a good physique and mental health.
Large Projects
A list of projects I've done that I think best showcase my skillset and passion!
AI Chatbot
Open domain AI powered conversational chatbot
Ongoing learning and building of an open domain AI chatbot. Designed and built a lot of the architecture of the high level model. Continuing to prove with cutting-edge research and development in the NLP space.
Newest Model (built with performers)Older ModelOslyn
Digital AI powered musician companion
Became a lead developer in a lot of the backend and AI functionality, eventually pushing the project as the AI team lead. Worked together with a small group of passionate developers; mentoring, growing, and inspiring one another.
Utilized AWS services such as: Amplify, Lambda, SageMaker, S3, EC2, DynamoDB.
Oslyn WebsiteZeroTwo-Bot (project bought out)
Discord bot serving millions of users
Worked as a web developer for a Discord bot serving millions of users (50+ million as of now!). Produced the home landing page, store page, and web dashboard. Gained experience with enterprise-level CI/CD: kubernetes, docker, JetBrains TeamCity, GitHub Projects, Apache Cassandra.
As of 2023, the project was successfully bought out by Joyn.gg and the web apps have been newly rewritten.
Home Page (design deprecated)Work Experience
- Royal Bank of Canada (2021 – 2022) — Technical System Analyst
- Developed and documented automation tools, saving thousands of support hours of work
- Presented demonstrations for 500+ users
- Led adoption days to introduce and give tutorial on tool usage
- University of Toronto (2020 – 2021) — Teaching Assistant
- CSC108 – Lecture assistant, assisting in leading small group discussion and support during lecture time
Open Source Projects
I believe open source projects are vital in benefiting all. The following are a list of open source projects I have created or contributed to.
Hugging Face Tokenizers
Collection of tokenizers used in natural language processing (NLP) applications. Navigating a large project used by many researchers and enterprises, I contributed to the developer experience (DX) of the tokenizers.
huggingface/tokenizersNuxt/Auth
Authentication module for the NUXT webapp framework. My main contribution was to head the Discord integration for authentication.
nuxt-community/auth-moduleAni-SS
Building an interface for WebGL shaders to behave on browsers. This project was inspired by bloc97's Anime4K project that were intelligently crafted shaders to enhance or recover visual quality of a video or image.
pinnouse/ani-ssZeroTwo Bot
My first large project. I learned the most from this project: developing software, deploying/hosting an application on the cloud, maintaining and scaling, interacting with APIs, and security/authentication. This project has given me lots of opportunity to explore technology and also expose me to a lot of great projects and developers.
pinnouse/ZeroTwoBotLodestone
Open source project to manage Minecraft servers with the goal of bringing security and ease of use to the everyday player that wanted to start a server.
lodestone-team/lodestoneAmadeus
NLP AI chatbot based on Google's performers (transformers with the attention mechanism performing linearly). My attempt at reaching for the stars with lots of training data and a whole machine learning pipeline to bring the project to life.
pinnouse/amadeusAWE (A WebAssembly Emulator)
A project to bring emulators to the world wide web. With the advent of web assembly, software and technology has never been so accessible. In this project, I aim to use the computer skills I have learned to bring game console emulators to your web browser!
pinnouse/aweRuumi
A service where you can watch shows together with friends. No more countdowns to sync up the timing, just join the room and enjoy together.
pinnouse/ruumiMacaron
Macaron is a hackathon project that sought to reduce the clutter of noise in today's media, and bring it down to bite-sized bits. This project won the hackathon's "The Perfect Pitch" award.
the-macaron/macaronBento
Bento is a hackathon submission to Hack the North 2020++. In this project, we aimed to create a solution for teachers to navigate the online setting as they would their classroom.
pinnouse/bentoSolid Dots (*nix Dotfiles)
A repository containing my riced configurations of Linux. Finding my way around and learning the ins and outs of Unix-like systems has been a fun treat and grow very comfortable with the terminal.
pinnouse/SolidDots