Vincent Chu Tinkerer | Leader | Innovator

Product & Engineering leader in SaaS.
Passionate with technology. Worked at Electronic Arts and Apple before venturing into the startup world.

Projects

I hope it's no surprise that most of my projects are software related. I would love to show some of the interesting work I've done for Visier, Apple and Electronic Arts, but unfortunately most of the work is covered by non-disclosure agreements. Because of this, majority of what's listed here is very outdated from the early 2000's. I haven't stopped writing software though - even as a senior engineering leader I have been writing code as a hobby.

Many of the projects here started off as university projects and I extended them into apps that others might find useful. I've also worked on a number of hobby projects after university. A lot of times these projects have helped me pick up new skills, meet new friends and explore new area of interest.

I thought about renaming this part of the website from "Projects" to "Museum". Most of the projects here are at least 10 years old and some of them are 20 years old!

If you're curious about what I'm up to with side projects, please check out my github page.

React Native

Most recently I started developing apps with React Native. You can check out the Receiptopia app and the new CJExplorer (Mac/iOS) that I published.

AI

In February 2024, using React/OpenAI/Python/Flask I put together a chat bot that's trained on my resume and things I wrote about.

UX Certificate

In 2023, I started going through the Google UX Design Professional Certificate. In the last course, I have to put on a website with my portfolio. Here is the deck with the 3 required case studies for the final assignment for the final course.

Algorithm / Programming

In my junior years at Simon Fraser University, I enjoyed spending time in extending my favorite class projects during semester breaks. Through them I taught myself many of the programming skills and computer algorithms that prove to be invaluable now.

Shortly after my graduation, I started working on a hobby project I called ASCII Art Steganography. It was slashdotted in January 2009, and I was quite proud of it.

Some examples: Digit Recognition, Huffman Tree Compression, Computer Language Translation, Socket Programming and Zip/JPEG File Mask.

3D Graphics / OpenGL
Computer graphics was the first upper division computer science course I took in my second year at SFU. I enjoyed the class - all the linear algebra math could finally be put into good use, and we got to use the "new" 1.8 GHz machines that were cutting edge at the time. The results? Very visually pleasing projects! This laid the foundation for becoming a software engineer in the gaming industry after graduation.

Notably, 3D Room Scene was showcased in SFU computing science Employer's Open House 2003, and 3D-Tetris Screen Saver was showcased in 2005.

C# and COM
I picked up a few skills from my co-op experiences at Crystal Decisions/Business Objects and Pivotal/CDC Software. I started using Perl to automate tasks (I used it to automatically generate spreadsheets and status reports(!) I sent to managers from a single data source). I also mastered C# and COM while I was developing applications to integrate into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

My first side projects done in C# include a multiplayer UNO game, and a small program for automatically refreshing a webpage being browsed (using IE Active-X control).

Miscellaneous
Since I like programming so much, I often spend my free time making utilities that I think would be useful for myself and people. These utilities are written in usually either C++ or C#, and MSN Ad blocker was particularly popular (well, until MSN got shut down..)!

Scripts and Tools
Python used to disgust me, greatly - its silly indents and duck-typing. In 2011, I decided to use it more in my regular work since people who love it keep raving about it - it turns out I've fallen in love with it too. Now when I need something written up quickly, I would always turn to Python instead of say, C#. It's cross-platform, it's the opposite of verbose and you can even hook up it up with a UI easily too in OSX.

Web Apps
The first real web applications that I wrote was done with Perl during the time when blogging was starting to gain popularity. Originally I was hosting my Perl blog on my university site, but I later shut it down in 2005 because I didn't feel like updating anymore.

I picked up PHP and SAJAX a bit later, and along with 2 other CMPT 470 classmates we created a ACM-Style programming contest environment.

I've worked on a number of web apps over the years using Google App Engine, Django and Ruby on Rails as side projects. In 2012, we created Qurious to participate in the Royal Canadian Mint Mintchip Challenge.

Recently I've done more work with javascript (jquery and sproutcore) to create rich and deeply engaging web applications. Especially with the proliferation of mobile devices, building responsive and feature-rich web applications that work for the different platforms and resolutions seems to be the most efficient way to deliver content in terms of development costs.

At Visier, I'm using Angular2, Typescript, Play! Framework on Scala.

ITK Medical Image Analysis Toolkit
As part of the research work I've done in August 2004, I have proudly created a huge C++ image segmentation and registration program with the use of ITK library. It's ideal for researchers who want to have some quick experience with the rich ITK library, but don't want to hassle of compiling the library and the example code.

In 2005, I started the now popular MATLAB library (MATITK) project which allows researchers to access ITK algorithms in the MATLAB environment. There are now hundreds of researchers worldwide that are users of this library!

Fun Projects / High school level projects
Feel free to check out the projects I did in high school and for fun in the old days.

All software is provided here "as is". I hold no responsibility for any unintended effects that may result.