Hello, all. I’m Michael, a student in the Bachelor of Computer Science second degree program at UBC. I spent the last four years at Duke University, getting a B.A. in psychology with a minor in English. As you can probably gather from that, I have a wide variety of interests both personally and professionally, in particular the integration of psychological principles in software development.

Most of my professional experience has been with Visual Knowledge Share Ltd., where my primary role was the creation of a training manual for new users of the company’s work instructions software. As someone who already has experience writing professionally, I consider this to be an important skill that is lacking in much of the development community. In fact, I am currently enrolled in the Computer Science Co-op program, and many of the job postings I see are posted by people who do not demonstrate  the ability to write capably. Naturally, I dismiss these postings entirely, which is indication enough of how important quality writing is.

Apart from that, another core academic interest of mine is language. Having grown up in Quebec, I can speak at least passable French, albeit not perfectly fluent. During my time at Duke, I spent multiple semesters studying both German and Japanese. To my great regret, I have never had occasion to use either of these languages practically, and as such I am by and large incapable of using them for anything more than the most rudimentary communication.