About

I’ve always been fascinated by magic.

In the modern age, the closest thing we have to magic is programming. You have to learn the secret languages, passed down through generations, some more arcane than others, each with its philosophy and its idioms. Hence, I’m fascinated by programming.

I grew up in Montreal and developed an interest in computers at a pretty young age. I remember being in the sixth grade when a friend of mine told me that he figured out how to make video games, and from that point onwards I was hooked. (It was only much later that I realized that game development is way too complicated for me, and requires a lot more than just programming!)

I first taught myself some basic programming in C and in C++, and later in high school, I was given the opportunity to take part in the Be a Computer Scientist for a Week day camp offered at McGill, where we programmed Boe-Bots in BASIC to navigate a maze. In CEGEP, I took a course on numerical methods for physical applications, which involved a programming project. Rather than do a physical simulation, my team created a viewer and builder for 3D cellular automata similar to Game of Life. It was around this time that I began to use Haskell.

In 2014, I started a Bachelors degree in Computer Science at McGill. I worked as a research assistant for Simon Gravel till 2015. While there, I developed visualizations for genetic data as well as an improvement for a tool called Tracts used to model ancestry information. In 2016, I started work at Oohlala Mobile (now Ready Education). I did Python backend work for their mobile applications, which are whitelabel products sold to universities. I was in charge of developing integrations with university systems (SIS, LMS) to pull in information such as student calendars, event calendars, course lists, etc. For the compilers course I took in early 2016, my teammate Frédéric Lafrance and I wrote our compiler for a subset of Go in Haskell. We got top marks in the class and I was given an honorary A+ grade by the instructor Laurie Hendren. (McGill does not actually have an A+ grade.) In early 2017, I left Oohlala, and in the summer I interned for 10 weeks at 1010data. My project’s goal was to improve the speed of the core platform login. One aspect of the login that made it slow was that a new process was spawned for each user session and this process needed to load a huge number of libraries. The idea to improve the speed was to spawn a partially initialized session process, with all the libraries loaded, and to fork it when a user needed to log in. Then the child process can complete the usually quick user-specific initialization tasks. The challenge was to get the K interpreter, which runs the user session process, to fork at all. The interpreter itself could not be directly extended as it is closed-source. Instead, I leveraged K’s ability to run extensions in C, and had to figure out how to get the interpreter to not crash after forking due to issues with inherited file descriptors. In late 2017, in my last term of undergrad, I did a research project with Brigitte Pientka that sought to understand how we could use copatterns in a language with an explicit model of time (see e.g. here).

In 2018, I started my Master’s degree in Computer Science at McGill. My advisor was Brigitte Pientka. At first I thought about extending the work I had done in my undergraduate research project, but this eventually shifted to working on proof search techniques with the eventual hope to integrate some of these into Beluga. We realized that to directly generate Beluga programs might be unnecessarily tricky, so we designed an intermediate language called the “proof script language”. This is at once more high level and more verbose than the traditional Beluga functional programming language. The focus of the project shifted once more as I began development on Beluga’s interactive mode. Ultimately, I developed with the help of Clare Jang and Marcel Goh a brand new interactive mode for Beluga called Harpoon. The interactions in this system are grounded in Contextual Modal Type Theory, and I gave an explicit elaboration from interactive actions into proof script fragments. Then I showed that the process of stitching these fragments together into a larger proof script preserves types. Finally, I developed a type-preserving translation from the proof script language into the traditional Beluga programming language. This demonstrates that interactive proofs are sound, and furthermore that any proof constructed interactively for a given theorem is indeed a real proof of that theorem. I finished the Master’s program in summer 2020, and my thesis is titled “Mechanizing Metatheory Interactively”. I presented this work at at LFMTP 2020 and later at CADE 2021. You can read the paper here and all the gory details in my thesis.

In summer 2020, I started working in a trading company called DRW. As this was at the height of the pandemic, I worked remotely. Ultimately, I decided that such a job in the industry didn’t suit me. In summer 2021, I realized that my favourite part of my job was showing my coworkers new and different ways of doing things. So with significant help from my partner, I pivoted careers into teaching. In fall 2021, I interviewed to be a faculty lecturer at McGill University, and got the job.

Since summer 2022, I have been a faculty lecturer at McGill, and so far I’m enjoying it much more than professional software engineering.