This was a very good week in terms of learning and getting out. Personal projects, not so much haha.

Wealthsimple Tech Week

I went to two events at Toronto Tech Week: Wealthsimple's R&D Rooftop Chat and Shopify's massive event with 4 talks. I enjoyed them so much that I ended up writing a separate blog post for what I learned in Toronto Tech Week. (Read here: wealthsimple and shopify)

From Wealthsimple, it started out as pretty "obvious" stuff. The kind that's obvious once someone says it, but you don't want to assume it's true since you've not experienced it yourself. One example is that their teams have a lot more work overlapping as programmers can now do a bit of design and designers can now do a bit of programming thanks to AI. Makes sense, but it's good to hear from a large company because it gives more weight to it than my own assumptions.

My goals and learning

I went into tech week hoping to improve my social skills as an introvert, since I believe that being able to initiate and enjoy conversations will be invaluable in my career, and it went well. I really enjoyed talking to people there and met a lot of cool folks. Learned about careers at Shopify, Robinhood, Wealthsimple, and more. They all seem like very cool places to work, and I'm excited to see that places I would enjoy working are actually fun.

I also learned that I've learned a lot from my time at Scotia in algo trading and have information to share that people are interested in. Some of them really liked hearing about algorithms, how they work, and interesting aspects of the trading world like dark pools. It was a nice realization that I've come so far.

Also got to talk to Diederik, Wealthsimple's CTO. More on that in my other blog, but he was a super cool guy. Would honestly love to work with him one day. Even if I know that's dreaming big, I need to graduate first before I think about buddying up to CTOs.

Shopify Tech Week

At Shopify, their schedule was action packed. 4 talks: UCP (universal commerce protocol) -- a protocol build for AI agents in shopping and also just standardizing the way information is retrieved in ecommerce, SimGym -- their simulation engine for vendors to test how shoppers interact with their websites, River and Aquifer -- an internal slack bot that handles all their PRs and coding plus its reusable and extensible harness layer, and finally Quantum Computing -- a talk with a quantum CEO whose differentiator is that he uses photons instead of electrons.

The talks were all very interesting and I met cool people here as well. In fact, I met someone from McMaster who also knows Owen at Boardy, and they're super close. It's crazy how small the world is because Owen once worked with me, back when I started managing InfraTech. He came in, did incredible work on our Hatch Booking System, and months later got engaged and then graduated to become a founding engineering at Boardy. Incredible guy.

Takeaways

My biggest takeaway from Shopify is that AI is everywhere (duh), and can be used in so many more applications than I would have originally thought. I can't imagine how much architecture must be around River, and the engineer within me was going over how I'd build it for days afterwards. I once went into my backyard and was pacing as I thought about the memory management system for River and my mom called me in for dinner confused because she thought I'd only step outside for a minute or so.

Anyways, I tried keeping this reflection short for the tech week events but it somehow got long again. I suppose it's a blessing that I have so much to say.

A resume variant system

Outside of tech week, I've been beefing up my resume and am quite happy with it now. The one-pager is solid, I have a decent PM version, and I further refined my developer-focused resume to specialize into AI, full-stack, and back-end roles. I have some crazy architectural code on Latex for this and I'm honestly pretty excited to share it on LinkedIn. If people are interested, I might make a templated resume and share it publicly.

I've also thought about building a web app to make it more accessible. There's a lot going on in Latex, but having a web version where you can tag bullet points within your work experience with a clean UI is probably a lot easier than using latex commands and writing out the tags yourself with no smart auto-complete or anything. One of my biggest struggles now is when I'm modifying a work experience for a specific resume, I need to mentally figure out which bullet points go with which resume variations. Sure I can compile it to see, but a web app would make it much easier. Maybe I'll do it one day... but I honestly feel like if Overleaf had an ability to do this, it'd be easier than building a web-based latex editor myself.

Overall, great week for learning and meeting new people, some decent work for my resume, but personal projects are still on the backburner. This'll be my last reflection for a while because I'm on vacation next week. Ciao.