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. I have an Honours Bachelor of Science (HBSc) in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Toronto. And I am interested in deep learning with transformers as well as accessible and beautiful software for both users and developers.
As a developer I have professional experience in automation software and web development. I am also familiar in mobile development, test-driven development, and functional programming.
Outside of software I play guitar, piano, and alto saxophone. I enjoy listening to all types of music especially jpop and classical. I am also trying to learn Japanese whilst improving my Cantonese. 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 that I have been a part of, that I think best showcase my skillset and passion!
Oslyn
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 Website
Lodestone
General game server management tool
Server managing tool designed with security in mind. Built with rust and using deno to sandbox custom scripts, this project is a large undertaking to create a usable, open-source tool.
Not only is it extremely functional, it is also beautifully designed (with UX in mind): altogether being a product you want to use, not just need to.
Lodestone Repository
ZeroTwo-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.
Archived Home Page
AI Chatbot
Open domain AI powered conversational chatbot
Ongoing learning and building of an open domain AI chatbot. Before the advent of large language models I would design and build a lot of the architecture of my own language models. Continuing to prove with cutting-edge research and development in the NLP space.
Newest Model (built with performers)Older ModelWork Experience
- Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest (2024) — Research Scholar
- Investigated neural network performance at varying levels of audio impairment
- Prepared environments for piloting experiments with new hardware and sensors
- 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.
Nuxt/Auth
Authentication module for the NUXT webapp framework. My main contribution was to head the Discord integration for authentication.
Ani-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.
ZeroTwo 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.
Lodestone
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.
Amadeus
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.
AWE (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!
Ruumi
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.
Macaron
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.
Bento
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.
Solid 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.