Table of Contents

About Me

Hello 👋

I'm Tony, and I love software. I am genuinely interested in most things Computer Science and I am constantly learning.

Whenever I have time, I like watching conference talks, reading random articles or books and browsing GitHub. Usually, that is enough to get me a project idea which I work on for some time and then the cycle repeats.

Interests

  • Concurrency and high-performance Software
  • Software Architecture, System Design & DevOps
  • DevTools, Libraries & Frameworks
  • Rust 🦀

"I realized I want to work for other devs and not clients directly"

Professional Experience

  • Member of the tech core team in Delft's Google Student Developer Club from December 2022
  • Received a Letter of Appreciation for performing data analysis and statistical processing of the exam results from the 2020-2022 academic years for the European Board of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (EBPRM) June 2022.
  • Student Mentor for Postman API Fest 2022 26th to 29th January 2022.
  • Junior Backend Developer at GILO Technologies from September to December 2021.

Some Cool Projects I've Worked On

  • A real-time, transparent chart of your controller trigger inputs - [repo]
  • A library that provides a couple of Unicode utilities for dealing with Unicode confusables/homoglyphs - [repo]
  • A Mandelbrot renderer that leverages multi-threading and SIMD instructions - [repo]
  • A QR Code generator library exposed as a web server and CLI. Built for Delft's GDSC - [repo]
  • An RSS feed aggregator that notifies you of new posts via email - [repo] [blog]
  • An experimental Compiler written in Rust - [repo]
  • A testing framework for a compiler written in Scala - [repo] [blog]
  • A proof of concept - clone of the C# AutoFixture package in Java - [repo] [blog]
  • A CLI tool to Git-Hooks through yml files - [repo] [blog]
  • A Discord bot that generates graphs on Covid data - [repo]

You can find a few more on my Github.

My Journey

This will get quite lengthy :)

2023

I managed to join my University's Google Developer Student Club! Carrying over some of the things I learned developing Rss2Email, I worked on a QR Code generator API for the aforementioned student club to avoid being dependent on third-party software for generating any QR codes needed for our events. I started reading Jon Gjengset's Rust for Rustaceans (great book and criminally underpriced, you should go read it) which influenced some of my design choices for the crate I built for the project.

Following the "contributing to open source" goal I set for myself for the year, I started opening various pull requests, mostly in Rust projects. These are small and simple contributions but I am planning on working my way up in terms of complexity over the rest of the year and you have to start somewhere :) A nice step up was a small patch I created for Veloren which was my first contribution to a really big, production codebase (over 200k lines of code) without any particular guidance.

I decided to spend some time writing a few more "useful" blog posts such as Python with a bit of Rust and Finding Rust crates which combined gathered around 1000 reads over 3 weeks!

Having finished Rust for Rustaceans, I started reading the brilliant Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos. This has been very insightful both when it comes to low-level concurrency but also unsafe and more advanced Rust, definitely recommended!

The book proved useful in a few areas of my Software Project where for 2 months, I and 5 other colleagues worked together in "developing a cheap little robot to teach children and students alike robotics and computer vision called Mirte". The project aimed to both get the robot to drive around a model city on very limited hardware and to create interfaces of varying complexity to our code and the robot directly so as to allow the users to implement the self-driving algorithms themselves.

The project was a success and it was really interesting to work on. Conveniently for me, we used Rust so I felt at home! Being more experienced in the language (and in projects) than my colleagues, I took responsibility for architecting key areas of the project as well as identifying various areas and problems that needed to be tackled early to avoid time sinks in the future.

Apart from learning a lot of new things while working on the project, it was really cool to see how a lot of things I had learned over time through my side projects contributed to this one (even that Scala testing framework I had made for a friend's compiler turned out to be useful). There was also one instance where I removed a bunch of unsafe, raw pointer code with 2-3 safe method calls which I was very proud of.

After all that was done and settled, I made a Mandelbrot set renderer which I think looks pretty cool. I also finally got around to looking into SIMD instructions to make it faster, dove a bit into constant generics and macros and wrote a blog post about them which surprisingly amassed over 1300 reads!

A while after having watched Dylan Beattie's talk called "Plain Text", I decided to dig into Unicode a bit more. The first time I encountered issues related to Unicode confusables was during my first internship, specifically with different double quote characters. As I often want to learn about multiple things per project, I decided to explore compile-time evaluation and parsing with Rust as well as creating bindings for JavaScript's Node runtime. It was quite a fun project to work on which you can find here.

2022

This is the first time I decided to set some goals for myself.

I decided to start by tackling one of them which was 'create and publish a NuGet package that does something useful' and thus, Rember was created. Rember is a CLI tool that lets you easily configure git hooks and is currently available both on Nuget and Chocolatey. This was the first time I packaged a project of mine and made it available to the broader public through a more general-purpose manager and it definitely was a great experience.

I was getting more and more interested in working on things like libraries and frameworks and I thankfully had the chance to work on one. A friend of mine is developing his own compiler and I decided to build a small testing framework for it. I got to dive into things like reflection and multi-threading and it has been a great learning experience seeing this project grow. I also consider the blog post I made about it to be the most detailed one so far so that is also nice.

This sparked an interest in learning more about optimizations and concurrency as well as other things like source generators.

Over the summer I decided to refine my knowledge of scalability and architecture design. I learned more about load balancing with Nginx and Caddy, monitoring applications using InfluxDB and Grafana, CQRS, event sourcing, different database strategies, bringing all that together with Docker and performing load testing with k6. All the reading that I did over this period has greatly helped me understand scalability and more importantly, how (and when) to build for scale as well as identify the parts of a project that can be scaled and how to go about doing that.

I learned a bunch more stuff about parallel and asynchronous programming which I'll be glad to make use of at some point.

I decided to start learning Rust while building my own Programming language, inspired by my aforementioned friend. Turns out, compilers are rather complicated and LLVM is not any better. I looked into syntax highlighting and neat error reporting as well.

Sometime after that, I decided to work on Rss2email to extend my Rust knowledge. Having finished it as of writing this, I must say I find it quite useful actually! I used some of the stuff I'd learned previously to package the project in a slim Docker image and make it easy to host on AWS Lambda.

2021

I got comfortable with deploying my projects. Learned how to work with Heroku and automate my builds, tests and deployments. I finished and deployed the chess game. I learned more about Docker and how to package my apps with it.

I wrote my first article on Spring Boot after polishing my knowledge of it a bit more and posted it to help my fellow students prepare for an upcoming course.

After taking a short break from learning on my own, I learned how to publish an npm package, FakeDB which to this day I am unsure as to whether it works or not and looking back, I am too scared to check.

I started working on Gromceri which was the biggest project I had
tackled so far. Learned about authentication and JWTs in particular. Learned a lot about C# and the .NET ecosystem. I learned how to securely deploy public repositories without giving all my credentials and secret tokens away. I worked on database optimizations as well as logging. For the first (and coincidentally last) time I used GraphQL in this project.

After working on that for a few months I went back to python to learn a bit of Django and FastAPI to prepare for my first internship. I dove into NLP using python with Spacy, Bert and PyTorch and a lot of regular expressions for my first internship. There, I also worked on API development with Python and Azure Functions as well as dove into asynchronous programming and profiling for the first time.

2020

Some of the earliest programming I ever did was making Discord bots with DiscordJS. Motivated to learn more about Javascript, I worked on my first 'big' project: coronaBot.

For no apparent reason, I decided to learn some basics about Linux (I briefly used Arch by the way), Bash and regex.

I got pulled into the realm of Machine and Deep learning, as well as Data Science and I learned a few basics about all 3 of these starting with Python but decided to switch to R. I discovered Kaggle and entered 2 competitions in which I was really proud to score fairly above average.

This is where University started so I had to drop working on these and I went for stuff that was more relevant to my program. I familiarized myself with the Java ecosystem some more. I learned about Maven and Gradle, testing and some basic CI/CD + automated test coverage reports. I learned SQL and started teaching myself about Spring Boot while also starting work on a multiplayer, browser chess game.

2019

This is when I first got formally introduced to programming and Computer Science in general.

I learned the basics of Java, and Javascript and wrote a few X86 Assembly scripts (don't ask). Learned the concepts of Object Oriented Programming as well as some stuff about Functional concepts. Got introduced to algorithms and abstract data structures. Began learning the basics of relational, document and graph databases.

There was not much self-learning throughout this year in contrast to the next ones since I was still very new to the field.