Steven's Blog

About me

My name is Steven Cao. I'm a fourth-year Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo specializing in AI and optimization, with a passion for building software that makes a real impact.

Résumé

For a detailed overview of my education, experience, projects, and technical skills, download my resume (PDF).

Experience

I've had the opportunity to work across various tech stacks in my co-ops:

  • Software Engineer at Pinterest, where I worked on the Metric Quality team overseeing Android, iOS, and Web clients. I deployed a domain-specific code generator for type-safe constants, optimized Android impression batching, and built tooling to track DSL key usage across repositories.
  • AI Developer at Rocscience, where I containerized Windows geotechnical software for on-demand Linux execution through an MCP server and developed AWS ECS infrastructure backed by Go, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
  • Mobile Developer at Compass Digital, where I developed Flutter food-ordering apps, built meal plan ordering workflows, and integrated Google Pay / Apple Pay on Web.
  • Android Platform Software Developer at Ford, where I built driver-assist features for next-generation infotainment systems, including real-time C++20 hardware-abstraction services and Android interfaces written in Kotlin and Java.
  • Web Developer at Caribou Contests, where I managed an online mathematics competition platform serving 50,000 K–12 students worldwide.

Projects

Applications and infrastructure

  • Pixiverse is a multiplayer productivity-tracker game built with Godot and Nakama.
  • Jonsole is a hardware project for the Jonsole desktop console. I wrote ESP32 firmware using FreeRTOS, along with a Tauri desktop app which enables connecting the hardware to CLI coding agents on a computer by bluetooth.
  • Proxmox Server is my self-hosted infrastructure for DNS, media streaming, file synchronization, game servers, Kubernetes workloads, and CUDA-accelerated local LLMs.

Hackathon projects

  • BailMeOut, from CXC 2026, is a personal safety app built with React Native and Expo. It uses ElevenLabs for real-time transcription and Gemini for context analysis, triggering a simulated incoming call when it detects a threat or custom trigger word.

Machine learning

  • Attention-DQN RPS Agent is a RL model for repeated Rock–Paper–Scissors against a fixed pool of opponents. It uses multi-head attention to learn patterns in action histories and a Deep Q-Network with prioritized experience replay to adapt to a set of opponent strategies.

Mathematical visualization

  • Simple Fractal Viewer is a C++ and OpenGL application that renders Mandelbrot sets in real time using GPU shaders, with interactive navigation.
  • Penrose Tile Generator creates mathematical art in Python by recursively subdividing shapes into Penrose tilings.

Developer tools and language projects

  • Vm is a Vim-like terminal text editor written in modern C++ following functional programming concepts, with motions, editing commands, search, and undo/redo support.
  • Ruse Interpreter is a full-stack implementation of a custom Lisp-inspired language, with a Spring Boot execution API and React code editor.

Rust terminal games

  • Wordle-Rust is a terminal Wordle implementation with colored feedback, dictionary validation, and configurable word lists.
  • Rust-Sweeper is a customizable terminal Minesweeper game with Vim-style keyboard navigation.

Minecraft mods

  • Smooth Boot is a Minecraft performance mod that optimizes thread counts and priorities during startup.
  • Low Fire reduces the obstruction and opacity of Minecraft's on-screen fire overlay.
  • TexTweaks provides texture scaling, enhanced mipmap generation, and configurable LOD bias for high-resolution Minecraft resource packs.
  • ResolutionControl+ adds custom internal resolution scaling to Minecraft for performance tuning and improved visuals.