I was recently traveling around Asia. Without cell service or a computer, I spent a whole lot of time doing “nothing”. My brain had the space to absorb the world around me and to listen to my subconscious aura.

How are there so many poorly designed sinks that spray water around or are too short to put my hands under?

Why are houses so monotonous in Toronto

I was clapping my friend, Adrian’s blog post earlier today when I found out Medium limits you to 50 claps. My friend deserved far more praise than that, at least 51 claps.

Behind me were Adrian and Blake. Adrian asked, what if we modify the HTTP request. Brilliant! Right there and then, we knew we were onto something.

We analyzed the HTTP requests being sent when we clapped. It looked like Medium was sending changes to the number of claps rather than absolute values.

Despite being allergic to [almost] everything, I love food and I love cooking. Being the competitive person I am, I want to hone my culinary skills to that of a Michelin-starred chef. This is an extremely ambitious goal of course, especially because I have to juggle it with software engineering. However, I believe certain engineering principles can be applied to culinary education.

Understanding Your Customers

When you got a fine dining restaurant, you’re not going for just the food. You’re going for the service, ambiance, and novel ideas. The plates you’re eating from were probably made from a local potter. The servers will…

It all started at the University of Toronto science camp. Along with my brother and cousin, we scavenged any and all the gizmos we could find from syringes to batteries to motors to light emitting diodes (LEDs). We didn’t really accomplish much with this loot other than illuminating the LEDs and making the motors spin really fast by connecting the batteries in series. Over the years, I had similar encounters with simple electronics that kept growing my interest.

If you’ve ever been asked to upload a photo of your government ID to prove your identity, you’ve gone through an identity verification process. If you haven’t, this is a screenshot of what Coinbase’s process looks like.

About a year ago, I was shocked to learn some companies still use a manual verification process despite the competitive market of automated providers: Onfido, Acuant, Mitek, Jumio, etc. These findings led me to naively assume I could create my own automated provider using off the shelf deep learning libraries. Of course, things are never that easy. …

Back in high school, my life revolved around Minecraft. From the time I got back from school to late into the night, my Skype online friends and I were Minecrafting. On weekends, I would record videos for my Youtube channel. As fun as this time was, sleeping 4–5 hours each night was taking a toll on my body. I’d fall asleep in half my classes, developed IBS, and my sinuses would never stop running.

After spending a few thousand hours of my life in Minecraft, I knew it was time to move on in my final year of high school…