I'm William

After I obtained my master's degree from the University of Waterloo, I began my career as a Frontend Developer at a subsidiary of Constellation Software.

My team was responsible for creating new features and improving the UI/UX of the company's products. When I first joined the team, I assisted with the complete redesign of the frontend of one of the company's major products. Afterwards, I led several front-end projects and became the team's go-to person for the front-end technology stack.

I enjoyed working at this company not only because I was surrounded by amazing colleagues, but also because I was able to contribute to creating products that improved the lives of millions of people worldwide.

The idea for creating a resume builder and download website came to me when I was looking for my first job. The goal of the website is simple: to put a smile on users' faces when they are working on their resumes with my tool. Therefore, the goals of the website are easy to use, free, secure, and powerful.

Naturally, the website needs to be free. No one would be happy if some resume templates or resume builder functions were VIP privileges. However, in order to keep the website free, I need to make it as cost-effective as possible. This seems impossible because, generally speaking, users need to create accounts and save lots of data in my database, which means the bandwidth and storage cost will be high. One day, I thought outside the box: "why not let users store their data on their own devices?" Ah, problem solved! This strategy gives my website another advantage: it's secure to use. All the data is saved in users' devices so they take control of their own data and don't need to worry about data leaks or tracking.

To make the website easy to use, I looked into MS Word and some popular text editors and tried to make my website have a similar user experience in terms of text editing. Then I did user research, analyzed dozens of resume builder websites out there, and finally refined the functions that my website needs to make it powerful to use.

Speaking of website development, I started the website frontend with Create React App and a customized Node.js server used for server-side rendering. I then migrated some modules to Gatsby as the project became bloated and finally integrated the website with Next.js. For the website backend, I utilized ASP.NET Core and MS SQL Server. As for DevOps, I chose Azure Linux Virtual Machine, which gave me great flexibility, but in return, I had to configure and maintain everything, from Nginx to DNS configuration.

This project is a treasure to me, and I learned a lot from it.

Pursuing my master's degree at the University of Waterloo is one of the most valuable gifts in my life.

UWaterloo presented me with the beauty of computer science: from computer networks to distributed systems, from artificial intelligence to reinforcement learning, and from Van Emde Boas Tree to multi-thread algorithms. My favorite research area is Empirical Software Engineering because it showed me that code is not just about machines; it is also about people.

UWaterloo inspired me to pursue what I love to do, armed me with a love for learning, and surrounded me with a wealth of wonderful peers.