8 min read
TermPocket: a budget that runs on school terms, not months
A free, open-source finance app for Canadian university students that budgets by term, reads screenshots on your device, and lets you record spending by talking to Pocky.
- project
Hi, I'm Rick.
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From idea to users, I ship AI products end to end.
“a stonecutter hammering 100 times with no crack, then it splits on the 101st...”
My experience
AI EngineerCo-op
I'm on the team building the agent pipeline that runs expert-network projects at Guidepoint, owning entity resolution and the evaluation loop.
- Moved company entity resolution to the first of five LangGraph agents, so every identity question is asked once behind a human-in-the-loop gate. It's the first step toward one agent for request overview, angle and company extraction.
- Own the evaluation loop: a replay harness that caught 5 defects unit tests missed, prompt experiments that lifted stability from 93% to 99% on 704 requests, and MLflow evals on Databricks against a PM-labelled golden set.
Software EngineerCo-op
Backend and infrastructure work on Rocket's title-insurance platform: C# services, and the Kubernetes deployment pipeline when it needed it.
- Led the first implementation of a transaction-verification service: a red-only risk check became a three-state green/yellow/red decision with workflow suppression and automatic underwriter notifications.
- Prototyped an AI pull-request review pipeline on Azure (Claude Sonnet 4.5) with zero data retention, and moved the team's Helm charts onto Argo Rollouts canaries.
AI EngineerCo-op
University of Waterloo IST
I built JADA, the co-op job-recommendation pipeline Waterloo developed with Microsoft Canada. It now serves 42,500+ co-op students a term.
- Designed the KNN job classifier on Azure Cosmos DB vector search and shipped the portal services around it: résumé search, profile-based recommendations and the InStage integration.
AI EngineerCo-op
At Inspur I built the document-ingestion side of a low-code RAG platform: PDFs, slide decks and spreadsheets in, a searchable Milvus index out.
- Cut retrieval errors by 30% by tuning the chunking strategy against an evaluation harness.
- Added an OCR fallback for scanned documents and fine-tuned a Surya OCR model on data I curated and labeled.
My projects
TermPocket
Made with:
Personal finance for university students, budgeted by school term instead of calendar month. 50+ users in production.
- Pocky, an AI assistant (EN/ZH) that drafts transactions from chat for one-tap confirmation, answers questions about your spending, and plans savings with deterministic math. Model chosen by an 82-case eval; prompt caching makes each turn ~70% cheaper.
- On-device screenshot import (OCR in the browser, zero silent amount errors on 215 benchmark rows) and Whisper dictation, nudged toward your merchant names (90% to 97% on a 60-clip synthetic set); plus a read-only MCP server for your AI client.
SlopFish
Made with:
A fork of Stockfish for a chess variant where capturing is mandatory. Built for Waterloo's CO 456 Game Theory course and placed top 4 in class.
- The rule must hold at every search node, so it reaches into move generation, ordering, check evasions and quiescence, where stand-pat pruning is disabled because a forced capture breaks alpha-beta's lower bound.
- Trained a variant-specific NNUE on 17.2M self-play positions and shipped it as the default. An independent self-play arbiter caught rule violations in 2.5% of games (promotions counted as captures); fixed and verified at zero in 400 games.
DearByte
Made with:
A self-hosted personal AI agent that turns Apple Watch health data, calendar and memory into morning briefs over Telegram. Open source.
- TypeScript agent loop on the Anthropic SDK with a validated tool registry and two model tiers: a cheap worker for bulk work and a stronger brain for judgment calls, swappable between DeepSeek and Claude. Every call is cost-logged under a weekly cap.
- Apple HealthKit bridged over remote MCP on Cloudflare Workers; spending context from TermPocket over read-only MCP; x402 purchases on Base Sepolia with explicit approval, seller allowlists and caps enforced in code.
openfilm (open source)
Made with:
Contributor to openfilm, the open-source AI video agent (3.9k stars, MIT). Some of what I've shipped across its agent layer, render pipeline and Electron studio:
- Built resumable rendering: films render in 1–10 s chunks, so a stopped render resumes where it left off. A 60 s 1080p film resumed frame-identical in half the time.
- Agent layer: conversations remember their agent and model across restarts, and the OS pings you when a turn finishes or needs an answer. Plus a 0.1× to 100× clip speed past Chromium's 16× media cap; the rest is under My PRs.
AGE Game Engine
Made with:
A C++20 module-based MVC game engine for 2D ASCII games, running Space Invaders and Snake.
- Entity-Component System with rendering, input, game loop and collision built in; new games subclass GameEngine and override virtual hooks.
My Education
Bachelor of Mathematics
University of Waterloo
2023 - 2028
- Major in Computational Mathematics
- Major in Statistics
- Minor in Combinatorics and Optimization
- Minor in Computing (Computer Science)
- Activities: Founding Member at Sustainable Physical AI Society (SPAIS); ML Lead at WAT.ai (Sentiment Pulse); Core Member at Waterloo Blockchain Club; Basketball Intramural Champion
- Available for 4- or 8-month co-op placements, May – December 2027 (Summer and Fall 2027).
Blog
21 min read
DearByte: Agent That Knows You
A self-hosted agent that reads my Apple Watch, calendar and budget, messages me first, and pays for small things once I approve. Plus, one month later: the labs shipped the same idea, and what that means for solo developers.
- project
17 min read
A Waterloo Student's Honest Recruiting Recap 2025/2026
From zero interviews to 30+ rounds including startups, unicorns, and FAANG. The unfiltered version.
- career
- personal
8 min read
From $6.5K to $20K to –$2.6K
A CRO stake that tripled on a Trump Media headline, then crashed into a $2,600 loss and a 36-day lock-up.
- investment
- crypto
- personal
Contact me
Open to Summer & Fall 2027 co-op
4- or 8-month placements, May – December 2027. I'm also open to part-time work and interesting side projects. Email is the fastest way to reach me.