Hi! I'm James 👋
I’m a 20-year-old student from Toronto. This wiki contains my research and engineering notes, plus writing across topics like programming languages, geography, and racing toward the 2027 World Championships with Team Canada.
Currently
- Incoming engineering at Neuralink in San Francisco.
- Retrieval and search infrastructure behind LLMs, Shopify, Sidekick + CX R&D.
- ML and networking research, Firefox privacy. Designed the methodology and the model: per-request bandwidth-cost estimation for blocked tracker requests, on-device ONNX inference, ~210M users. Coauthored the paper (under review); built the enhanced tracking protection metrics surface it feeds. Gecko security patches on the trust boundary.
- Built open-source software used by 30k+ students.
About me
- I enjoy ultras and triathlons! Qualified for Team Canada for the 2027 Age-Group World Championships with an age-group win at the Gatineau sprint aquathlon (750m swim, 5km run), plus a few 100km/80km trail races this year.
- I competed in debate internationally and coached students for four years.
- I’m a geography nerd. I have a collection of maps I find interesting (please ask me!!), and geek out on Geoguessr.
- I have a very, very cute cat.
Currently reading
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Built with Gleam, Rust, and Astro.
Index
- Systems and ML at Firefox. Six months on the Firefox Privacy team: a multi-process aggregation system in Gecko's C++ engine, security patches on the trust boundary, machine learning research, and a new-tab privacy surface shipped to 210M users.
- Search Infrastructure and Software Engineering at Shopify. Working notes from my engineering internship on Shopify's Sidekick and CX R&D team in Toronto, building the search infrastructure and software behind the help tooling around Sidekick. Mostly search and systems, with some applied LLM work. Written as I learn it.
- Machine Learning
- Open Source Contributions. Engineering on MarkUs and PythonTA, two open-source tools maintained at the University of Toronto and used across the CS department.
- Linear Algebra
- DSA. Data structures and algorithms notes, worked from first principles. Interval sweeps, the common patterns, and designing data structures.
- Triathlon. Training notes and race logs. Team Canada, 2027 Age-Group World Championships.
- Writing. Personal notes that I'm okay sharing publicly.