Jonathan Villemaire-Krajden

Who am I?

I grew up in Montreal, in a melting pot of cultures. I learned English and French as I was growing up, and then towards the end of grade school, Python. This language that allowed me to interact with a computer rapidly captured my attention. English and French structured my thinking and allowed me to express and expand my ideas; Python was another language with which I could explore the world around me.

My various interests where well served by my discovery of programming. With POV-ray I learned about optics, graphics and Open Source.

As I grew interested in entomology and photography, I began building a web application in PHP with PostgreSQL. This allowed me to catalog my pictures of insects with their identification. Since I knew little to nothing of security at the time, and not much about best practices, it never saw the light of day outside of 127.0.0.1.

This was also about the time that I began experimenting with Linux distributions, running through Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Gentoo (I stayed on that one for a while), and a few others, before settling on Fedora these days. I also have a server running Ubuntu LTS.

After playing around with programming for various tasks, I became curious about programming itself. First informally through small computational challenges, and then during my undergrad degree.

During my studies at McGill in physics and computer science, I tinkered with C, C++, and java as well as a little SML.

In 2009, slightly before graduating, I turned my hobby into a profession, and entered the world of web development. I now look forward to honing my skills in other fields of computer science, and bringing together my theoretical knowledge with applied work. I want to look at distributed computing, as well as machine learning.

Appart from programming, I bike competitively and for fun, and commute on my bike year round. Many of my recent projects are tied to cycling. I have created and manage the McGill Cycling Team's website, and I put together code for a goldsprint (indoor bike race) to manage the race as well as capture the output of ANT+ sensors. This involved reverse-engineering the protocol, a wireshark adventure. I also wrote some simple code to use a webcam for photo-finishes. It's way cheaper than a line-scan camera, but at 30fps in good conditions, not quite as race worthy.

I have also played and competed in badminton. I enjoy cooking, and consider myself a decent vegetarian cook. I enjoy spending time outdoors, hiking, biking, or just crawling around looking at the small things that exist in the wild and which we spend most of our time walking over without noticing.

Qui suis-je?

Je vous promet que ça s'en vient en français aussi. _() - Ça c'est ugettext à la rescousse!