Hello! I'm Christian, a master's student at UCLA currently studying Computer Science. My broad interests include networking, operating systems, driver development, IoT, and full-stack system design.
I currently work with the UCLA Water Technologies Research (WaTeR) Center on their distributed water treatment project in the Salinas Valley. During my undergraduate years, I designed and implemented several major components for the project's "cyberinfrastructure." This included a REST API to collect sensor data from hundreds of devices in the field, integration with MongoDB and PostgreSQL databases for sensor data storage, and a web application to remotely monitor the water treatment systems and download sensor data for scientific analysis.
I had the wonderful opportunity of working with platforms teams at Google Cloud. My project focused on writing PCIe-level simulations of new network hardware being developed for Google Cloud. Much of my summer involved learning about PCIe, writing QEMU simulations, and debugging interactions with the Linux Kernel.
Most of my work was done in C. I got to work with the IDPF Driver, which was pretty exciting as it is still in development.
My summer at D.E. Shaw was spent working with systems teams to develop a new tool to manage highly available distributed timeseries databases. This was my first real exposure to PostgreSQL and distributed systems. Most of my code was in Golang with some shell scripts used to automate deployment. This was a neat experience in independently designing, developing, and testing a new tool from scratch.
I worked with the WhatsApp Business API team. I contributed to the implementation of the new cloud-based WhatsApp Business API, which was publicly released a few months after my internship. This was a very fun opportunity to work with a large codebase and follow the development of a new product from its early stages.
My main contribution was the implementation of route selection for media messages (stickers, images, videos, etc.). This involved a very fun deep dive into the WhatsApp media pipeline and interactions between old and new back-end systems.
My first software internships were with section 332H at JPL. This group focused on interplanetary communications. My internship focused on developing software to interact with ION, JPL's implementation of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN).
My summer project involved developing an extension to ION to support opportunistic message routing following the "Spray and Wait" algorithm. The ION codebase, which is written in C, is designed to be very platform-agnostic with a particular emphasis on supporting RTOS environments on flight computers. As a result, the codebase acts almost like a mini operating system, so I gained experience with many OS concepts such as semaphores, mutexes, message queues, and managing shared memory.
I returned to JPL in the spring to work with PyION, a Python wrapper for ION. At the beginning of my internship, there existed conflicts between the memory management system of ION and Python's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). I interned part-time refactoring the PyION codebase to resolve these conflicts. Since PyION is a C python extension, this internship gave me a cool opportunity to think about ownership, object lifetimes, and memory management in C.