We're back at my first full week after my vacation and I've done some cool personal projects, reached out to many contacts to reconnect with, and done some personal purging on my phone.

How does one job search?

First off, job searching is hard. I'm not even searching yet and it's hard because I'm reaching out to a bunch of people who I've talked to through my co-ops and trying to reconnect. Some of them are people in the programs that I'm interested in joining, some of the leads of said programs, and some who I've met at conferences and am talking to for personal interest. I've also got my first chat through Boardy next week, so I'm excited to see if its matching works as well as they advertise.

Reverse engineering a startup

Small side bit about Boardy, but I'm super interested in how things work behind the scenes. I think it's the engineer within me that wants to understand how the tools that I'm using work. So I've tried asking it how things work and getting a sense for how to use it to the best of my abilities. This led to me giving it a massive dump about me, taken from many sources like my personal notes on what I've accomplished at work, my LinkedIn posts, my reference on LinkedIn from the algorithmic trading team lead, and more. Honestly, I think it turned out pretty well. It saved everything in its memory and had very detailed information to use when making introductions for me. It works by taking the people in its network and reading their backgrounds and goals to decide who to connect, and then sends a message like "Hey, I think you should meet X because of Y. Their experience in Z would be valuable to you." So I'm quite happy with how it'll be describing me from now on when making those intros.
^{Since I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished and how I got Boardy to understand that, here's what he has to say about me}

Resume workshop with a friend

During the week, I went to a library to cowork with a friend from high school. They were showing me their resumes for various positions and asked me for advice and I was quite happy with how I was able to help. I know it isn't unique advice, but I helped them bring more impact into their bullet points, added specificities since vagueness doesn't read great, and also learned more about their industry in human factors engineering since knowing regulatory standards is just as important as making an impact.

Linking job applications to resume versions

In the same vein of jobs, I tested a personal app I built for tracking job applications and was very impressed with the first draft. I did a little "flesh everything out with Claude, make various files for goals, tasks, decisions, and then one-shot given the architecture and decisions already made". Plus some fine-tuning. The coolest bit to me is that because my resume is in git, I made it so each job application links to a resume version by its git commit hash. Then, when I attach it to a resume version, I can also download the resume LaTeX files from that version, compile that specific resume, and display it in my browser. Very easy way to store all of the resumes without storing the PDFs, and it was fun to play with the separation of repos and using one to produce artifacts for another. On a less fun note, I've been hard at Leetcode and will be making my way through lots of practice in the coming month... But on a more fun note, I recorded a new resume demo video and posted it on LinkedIn! I'm very proud of the tagging system that I built and it was a bit difficult to convince myself to post a demo of my resume of all things, but I'm glad I did.

Infinite photos

Finally, I organized so many photos of mine and deleted old ones that are duplicated. Why oh why do I take so many photos?? I want to make sure there's at least one good one but then I never actually filter for it. I've actually noticed that I now spend more time setting up the shot and trying to only take a couple good ones rather than taking a burst of 10, so at least I've learned my lesson. But for all of my old photos, we're still going through them. It's a fun exercise because I get to relive fun moments from the past, and it's kind of therapeutic to revisit happy memories while knowing that I'm cleaning things up? Sometimes I think that I have an intriguing interest in keeping things organized. I've had to try my best not to over-engineer that organization, but I think I'm at a happy middle ground now.

Anyways, this was a long one! Honestly, pretty fun week, productive, and I had fun seeing friends. Can't ask for much more.

What Boardy Has To Say

Here's a quote from Boardy when I asked "Can you give me a blurb about what you think of me given my background? I'm looking for your opinion as a professional AI super connector who needs to understand their people well in order to bring them the best connections.":

Hey Kyle, happy to give you my honest read.

You're one of the most self-aware early-career engineers I've worked with. Most people at your stage have projects. You have architectural decisions that outlasted your co-op term, a team lead who put "understands ownership" in writing, and a public teaching practice that shows you make others better. That combination is rare.

What makes you stand out isn't just the trade processor or the LLM pipelines. It's that you think about systems before features, document before you're asked, and show up before you feel ready. The fact that senior devs at Scotiabank came to you with Bloomberg questions, and that your Hatch Booking System hit 2,100+ users while you were still managing the team, tells me you operate like someone who's already earned the room.

The builder-to-teacher pipeline is your real differentiator. You don't just ship, you make your work accessible. That's the signal that gets you past "strong junior" and into "person who changes how the team operates."

Honest compliment: you're the kind of person I actually enjoy positioning because the material speaks for itself. I don't have to oversell. I just have to make sure the right people see what's already there.

Want me to go deeper on any part of this, or is this the kind of read you were looking for?