Compass is a technology based real estate company based in Manhattan and with offices in numerous major US cities. Going into this term I wanted to get a good understanding of how to build a production level app. During this term, my main project was to re-architect the Compass Markets app, leveraging MVVM in Swift, increasing testability of the app by 75%. I also rewrote al unit tests in the app eliminating 2 dependencies on the codebase. Finally, during a company wide hackathon I designed and implemented a novel solution to download and inform users of nearby listings via geo-fenced notifications, without requiring additional user permissions. Over the term, I was exposed to good coding practices with Swift, continuous integration and architecting apps.

As a pilot we have to record the time that we takeoff and the time that we land. These are used for maintenance purposes for the amount of time between maintenance cycles. As a pilot I noticed that we would often estimate or even forget to record this time. I thought there must be a better way to record these times and set out looking for a way to do it. Around the same time I started doing iOS development. After looking at some of the iOS API’s I thought it would be a cool project to learn iOS development to try and record these times. I started this project about 2.5 years ago as a personal development side project. Today I am still working on it, with some others helping too! Even though testing the algorithms has been challenging and working on it after work and school has been tiring we are getting closer to releasing the product. If you are a pilot and are interested in the app, take a look at our website or send me an email if you have any questions.

Nanoleaf is a medium sized startup based in Toronto and Shenzhen, China. The start of my term was exciting as it coincided with the launch of their new product, the Nanoleaf Aurora, a modular smart lighting product. My role as an iOS developer was to take the app and improve it to make customers experiences with Nanoleaf products better. In this role I reduced customer support calls by 20% by implementing a flow within to app that guides users who are having trouble pairing with the Aurora, established the use of feature documents to clearly communicate needs between business, design and engineering teams, architected and built out a feature that allows users to download scenes that Nanoleaf features and worked on smaller tasks to improve the overall UI/UX of the app, such as making the app iPad compatible. One of the biggest roles I had was helping define a vision for the app so that it would clearly fit into the existing ecosystem of Nanoleaf products.

Founded in the fall of 2014, The Canon Innovation Lab is a small team of designers and developers working to rapidly generate and implement ideas to respond to the evolving needs in the photography space. The start of my term at the Lab was exciting as it marked the beginning of production development for Jumpshot, the Lab’s first prototype to go out to users. At Canon, I organized developers to start following a Git flow structure for branching to ensure bugs were isolated. I also got the chance to build a variety of different prototypes within the post capture space which exposed me to technologies such as OpenCV (Objective-C++), D3.js and Python.

The Weather Network is a leader in providing Canadians with accurate weather forecasts. As part of this, The Weather Network is always looking for ways to improve their product offering for their customers. One such product is their precipitation radar product. Traditionally, radar products made use of raster photos and animated them at intervals of 15-30 minutes. This resulting in choppy movement between frames, which is undesirable. The main project that I worked on focused on vectorizing the precipitation so that the radar images could be animated smoothly. In this role, I took over the iOS project for the vectorization of the radar and also worked on developing custom shaders with WebGL and THREE.js to allow the overlay of different types of precipitation. At the end of the term we presented the new radar to the CTO, COO and other Pelmorex staff. You can see the radar here!

At CIBC, I worked on the CIBC trading floor in the Equity Markets Technology Division ensuring that trades went through without any issues. Much of my role was Project Management to ensure that we knew where servers physically were and making sure that we had logs of maintenance on servers. In this job my responsibilities were to keep a log of server changes and note any difference to what we have on file and to create a log of total daily trades on each server so that we have an exact record of the number of trades going through each server. Over the course of my term, I conducted an audit of unused trading connections resulting in $2,000 of savings for CIBC per month and developed a VBA script to automatically record the number of daily trades reducing the time spent on the task by 15-25 minutes.

The HCOM Lab is a multi-disciplinary lab that studies how humans interact with complex systems. My role as a research assistant was to help Master’s student Samuel Lien with the design of a pilot and Air Traffic Controller (ATC) interface, help collect data and help analyze the data after the completion of the study. In this role, I recruited pilots and ATC through social media, forums, blogs and personal contacts, organized the scheduling of pilots and ATC so that the study could be conducted at times that work both all parties (pilots, ATC and us), analyzed the recordings of the study for keywords and phrases that would be used to create results and contributed to the design of the interfaces using knowledge of both ATC and pilot interfaces.

A copy of the thesis can be found here