About Me

My Résumé

Quick Overview

Hello! :)

I'm Tommy, I truly enjoy coding and my work revolves around my goal of developing software that improves people's lives.

From various work experiences, personal projects, and course material, I have established a solid foundation in software engineering and development. In particular, I am experienced in backend development with Node.js and Python. In addition, I am also proficient in JavaScript/HTML/CSS, C++, and Java.

I really enjoy coding and am always open to learning new skills. Outside of classes and work, I contribute to open source, go to hackathons, do research, and make personal projects. I also like to spend my free time playing games and listening to music.

Experience


Professional Experience

Google

Software Engineer

  • Using AI to make YouTube a safer platform for users and creators.

Google

Software Engineering Intern

  • Worked on Google Ads analytics backend production infrastructure services
  • Built an API used by 2 other teams handling 10 million+ requests per hour
  • Fully implemented, tested, and deployed API to production using various Google internal tools

Amazon

Software Development Engineer Intern

  • Worked on Amazon Luna backend services
  • Designed, implemented, tested, and deployed a new Luna service from scratch using AWS CDK
  • Built a fully functional CI/CD pipeline with 7 stages for automated testing and deployment

AbbVie, Inc.

Student Software Engineer; Team Lead

  • Leader of UCI capstone team developing software which generates a 3D model from a set of three existing 2D images
  • Managed and assigned tasks and stories among team members to ensure collaborative efficiency
  • Designed and implemented stitching algorithm using dlib facial landmarks to improve 3D facial model depth accuracy

U.S. General Services Administration

DevOps Engineer Intern

  • Developed proof-of-concept CI/CD pipeline for provisioning serverless AWS infrastructure
  • Tested extensible automated build, test and deploy workflows with AWS CodePipeline using resources defined with CloudFormation templates in AWS CDK (Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, S3, API Gateway)
  • Tested AWS resource delays to facilitate business decisions of moving legacy systems to AWS infrastructure

Paciolan, LLC

Student Software Engineer

  • Designed and implemented new Twilio shortcode SMS feature using AWS in Node.js
  • Implemented AWS CloudWatch metrics to record the number of SMS sent
  • Implemented unit and component tests with Mocha framework reaching 100% path coverage
  • Utilized AGILE practices for software development and GitLab for version control

Nuitka Organization (Open Source)

Member

  • Implemented new algorithm to support distutil compilation of packages with distinct namespaces
  • Improved automated PyPI testing algorithm running time by 50% via caching

Google Summer of Code 2019

Student Developer

  • Worked under the Nuitka sub-organization of Python Software Foundation
  • Implemented automated testing algorithm to ensure Nuitka's compatibility with the most popular PyPI packages
  • Developed py_module compilation support for Nuitka
  • Improved clarity of Nuitka standalone test files with the addition of a special mechanism
  • Performed standalone package testing to find bugs in Nuitka compilation
  • Click here for a summary of my work

Undergraduate Research (Calit2)

Researcher

  • Utilized QIIME, Qiita, and MG-RAST to perform DNA analysis on data from sequencing centers
  • Presented findings of the human gut microbiome and living habits to an audience of over 300


Hackathons

"SafeSkate" - Winner of HackUCI 2020

  • Computer vision and IoT project to detect obstacles for skateboards via Raspberry Pi camera
  • Designed and implemented backend algorithm for object detection using OpenCV in Python
  • Optimized backend script to detect contours 30% faster by improving code logic
  • Set up Firebase and communication between backend and frontend via API endpoints

"CodeBattle" - Winner of HackSC 2019

  • Led my team to develop CodeBattle, an interactive coding webpage where players battle in real-time
  • Communicated with team to create a structure of connecting frontend to backend
  • Implemented backend using AWS serverless lambdas with API endpoints to interact with frontend
  • Constructed database for user and room data using Amazon DynamoDB

"Zot Calendar" - HackUCI 2019

  • Designed an assignment tracker for students which sorts tasks based on importance
  • Took initiative to communicate with team and decide on frameworks to use
  • Implemented backend algorithm to determine the importance of each task on a person’s schedule

"Zot Trending" - ZotHacks 2018

  • Created a newsfeed web page sourcing trendy news via APIs
  • Implemented backend algorithm to source news using Python
  • Constructed API routes to communicate with frontend using Flask
  • Learned the Git Flow and the importance of teamwork in software projects


Projects

Discord Battle Bot

  • Discord bot which allows users to challenge other users to a mini-game duel
  • Built using the Discord API in Python

Wumpus World AI

  • Project for CS-171 Intro Artificial Intelligence
  • Created AI which makes smart decisions based around its environment
  • Designed and implemented data structures for the AI's knowledge base
  • Implemented A* search to efficiently navigate to desired parts of the map

Tic Tac Toe

  • Tic Tac Toe game with an unbeatable AI
  • Implemented AI in JavaScript with minimax algorithm

Columns 2

  • Pure Python version of the classic video game Columns
  • Implemented game logic using Python
  • Developed display using the Pygame package

Web Scraper for Newegg

  • Implemented scraping algorithm using Python
  • Takes in a search term (ex: gaming mouse) as input
  • Writes all the search results found on newegg and their relevant information to a .csv file

Python Heapq Wrapper

  • A simple wrapper around the Python heapq implementation to make it more convenient to work with heaps