Hello, I'm Derek.

I am a software engineer with a B.S. in Materials Engineering and minor in Chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating with highest honors.

I worked in the materials industry for a year and a half doing R&D and manufacturing as a materials engineer and a process engineer. I ultimately decided to pivot and change my career path, so in April 2019, after a year of studying software engineering at a trade school in San Francisco, CA, I got a job as a full-stack software engineer at a DERMS and IoT company in the Energy Industry called Energyhub. I am interested in web development and machine learning and have experience writing full-stack applications using a range of modern technologies and look forward to what is in store for the industry.

Aside from coding, I enjoy music and foreign languages. I play violin and piano and was in a performance group that did tours domestically and internationally in Europe and Asia. This inspired my interest in foreign languages and connecting with people. One of my life goals is to become a polyglot of 10 languages. Currently, I know conversational Cantonese, intermediate French, intermediate Spanish, basic Russian, extremely basic German, and can read Arabic and Japanese. I enjoy traveling and experiencing new cultures and people, and their food - I love food!