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udia

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https://udia.ca

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Location: Edmonton, AB, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Case by case

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, PHP, Elixir, Golang, React, Vue, Svelte, PyTorch, Kafka, GraphQL, MySQL, MongoDB, MSSQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB), Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Jenkins, GitHub Workflows, Azure, Cloudflare Workers, etc.

Résumé/CV: https://media.udia.ca/2025/06/2025-06-02%20Alexander%20Wong%...

Email: alex@udia.ca

Website: https://udia.ca

Experienced SWE with over 10 years of working experience. Looking for opportunities to own full-stack features, drive platform modernization, or bridge ML/AI systems with robust engineering. Open to staff+ level roles or senior IC with leadership responsibility.

Instant Pot died primarily due to private equity greed, not because of Instant Pot reliability.

In 2017, Cornell Capital bought the company for a total $500M of which $300M was financed by debt. Then 4 years later in 2021, it refinanced and added on debt, bringing the total debt to $535M. $245M was immediately paid out to shareholders as a dividend. Cornell Capital got paid back all the cash it invested in the company's acquisition, and then some. In 2023 due to high interest rates the company was no longer able to service its debt, costing the company ~$50M a year, and the company had to file Chapter 11.

Would it be possible to build a business that were completely public and transparent?

Every dollar that was spent would be published publically. All source code would be made free and permissive, open source. Users would always own their own data and could frictionlessly share with each other.

There would be no advertisements. All analytics would require explicit opt in and be visible to the general public.

The app would be localized to all languages, using heuristics and machine learning to perform the bulk of the translations, with human verification.

The app would be an attention focuser, calendar, general search, peer-to-peer connecting, encrypted, public monstrosity. It would be subtle and discrete, running just out of reach of direct human interaction.

u0.vc

I don't see why Google does not trial offering a paid service where advertisements are stripped away from the search results. A new revenue model in addition to the existing ad supported approach where you pay for your search.

This was my strategy for some time, but I switched to using a proper password manager (Bitwarden). If your algorithm is discovered you're in as much trouble as if you used the same password across multiple sites.

Nice to have a new offering for edge compute/streams! It would be useful to see how this compares with the different edge compute alternatives (particularly Cloudflare Workers/Durable Objects) in terms of TCP Connection Time, Time To First Byte, Time To Last Byte, etc.

This is really cool but there are a few usability issues. I suggest to overly html DOM ontop of the canvas rather than having users enter form details within the experience as the only method of signing up. Other users who are trying to stand up can stand between my camera and the form itself, making it such that I can't see what the form is trying to ask me or what I am typing.

+1 for Supabase. Currently playing with Phoenix Framework and using Supabase's postgresql offering. Just needed to enable Session pooling and the CITEXT extension, but otherwise it all worked fine. Very price competitive with many of the other DBaaS.

I have had a lot of success with this course (Web Accessibility, by Google): https://www.udacity.com/course/web-accessibility--ud891

In this course you’ll get hands-on experience making web applications accessible. You’ll understand when and why users need accessibility. Then you’ll dive into the "how": making a page work properly with screen readers, and managing input focus (e.g. the highlight you see when tabbing through a form.) You’ll understand what "semantics" and "semantic markup" mean for web pages and add ARIA markup to enable navigating the interface with a range of assistive devices. Finally, you’ll learn styling techniques that help users with partial vision navigate your pages easily and reliably.

Make the source code publicly available under a permissive open source license so the community can run the software. Scrape/generate a read-only archive of the site and host the static files for the next ~2 years before finally dropping the domain.

Having a Pixel 3 phone, I was annoyed that long-screenshots and call recording weren't available by default. Even when I rooted the stock ROM and disabled automatic updates, I would find that occasionally one morning my root setup would fail SafetyNet (where it was working the night prior). I addressed this by flashing the PixelDust rom on my phone. It now has stable root and I control all updates.

As mentioned in many other comments, it's nice to own your device and not have it broken by automatic updates pushed from some external entity (intentional or not).

A quick writeup for how to do this is available here: https://udia.ca/posts/2020/08/root_pixel_3_with_ota/

  Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
  Remote: Yes (2 years of experience)
  Willing to relocate: Not preferred
  Technologies: React, PyTorch, Django, Phoenix Framework; JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Elixir (See Resume for more complete list.)
  Résumé/CV: https://media.udia.ca/Alexander_Wong-Public_Resume.pdf
  Email: alex@udia.ca
  Website: https://udia.ca
I am a Software Developer with over 5 years of full stack web development and 2 years of academic machine learning experience. I aim to build and design products that creatively fuse machine learning with the modern web.

I am currently completing my Master's degree and have an expected work availability of January 2021.

Clickable:

Résumé/CV: https://media.udia.ca/Alexander_Wong-Public_Resume.pdf

Website: https://udia.ca