My name is Declan Easton, I am a Software Developer living in Vancouver Canada. This is my personal blog where I have primarily written about travelling in Europe and Central America. I have also written some posts about my personal software projects.
I work at Plenty of Fish as a Backend Software Developer. Plenty of Fish is currently hiring, follow the link if you are interested!
Personal Projects
I always like to have one or two projects on the go. Personal projects are an excellent way to expand technical knowledge, practice engineering skills, or just scratch a creative itch. This kind of continual personal development is very important to me.
My current project has been an introduction to and continued education in Machine Learning. I started with Andrew Ng’s popular Coursera course Machine Learning. I read and completed (most of) the exercises from Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow. More recently I read through Building Machine Learning Pipelines and Practical Recommender Systems. Learning about this “wide and deep” field has been incredibly satisfying.
I have a hobby Voxel Game Engine although development has been paused while I focus on Machine Learning. That project lets me practice a broad range disciplines including low-level rendering, high performance networking, complex application architecture, and GPGPU programming.
Check out my GitHub to see what else I might be up to!
Education
I graduated from the Electrical Engineering program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. While in school I entered the co-op program. As a co-op student I would take 4-8 month breaks from school to work. During my co-op terms I worked in various Software Development roles where I was exposed to full-stack web and desktop app development. By the time I graduated I had acquired 16 months of professional experience and a love of software development.
Interests
I am always trying to continue my education by reading books, listening to podcasts, and working on hobby projects.
I really enjoy getting into the outdoors by hiking, camping, downhill mountain biking and snowboarding.