Hi, it's me, Kush Bhagat. You may or may not know me, but either way, thanks for taking your time to check out my website. To get things started, let me tell you a little bit about myself. Right now, I am studying at the University of Waterloo, pursuing a degree in Computer Science and hoping to graduate by 2023. I am a hard-working individual, with excellent time management skills, and I always have a positive attitude. I love to socialize with friends, as well as meet new people, so feel free to contact me!
Introduction
Hobbies and Interests
Now that you know a little bit about me, let me tell you some of my favourite things to do. Some of favourite sports include taekwondo, soccer, and swimming, but I tend to enjoy playing any type of sport that keeps me active. I started to do taekwondo when I was around seven years old, and ended up continuing for about ten years in which I competed in sparring competitions and also became a taekwondo instructor. Similarily for swimming, I started at a very young age and progressed to become a lifeguard and swimming instructor. In relation to other interests, I love to program in my free time, and challenge my self with difficult problems. I have a strong interest in all genres of music, with my favourite being hip-hop.
Projects
Hover or Click on the images below to see description
Road Mixify
September 2020 | Angular, Node.js, Heroku, Spotify API
Road Mixify is an Angular web app allowing Spotify users to create randomized playlists based on road-trip duration and user-selected artists and albums. Users are allowed to select as many artists/albums they want on their playlist, and the app will create a personalized playlist that matches their exact road-trip duration.
Image Repository
December 2020 | Node.js, Angular, MongoDB, Heroku
This is a web application that allows users to view and upload private/public images. It acts as a repository and anyone can create an account and upload images. It also gives the user the ability to delete as well as view other public images. Uploading images is also secure, and only authorized users can do so, this is enforced by using JSON web tokens. All passwords stored on the database are also encrypted, so nobody has access to them (not even me).
Connect 4 AI
April 2020 | Pygame
This project was developped in order to create a connect 4 AI that could theoretically always win. To do this, I implemented a depth limited minimax algorithm. This algorithm strategically calculates which move leads to the most success by figuring out what move you are most likely to make. In addition to this, I incorporated an alpha-beta pruning process that reduces the amount of search required. This game was then put together using the UI from Pygame, and allows the user to play as first or second player. Feel free to check out and test the project by cloning the repo on my GitHub.
WLP4 Compiler
January 2020 - April 2020 | C++, MIPS
The WLP4 Compiler was a compiler that implements scanning, parsing, context sensitive analysis, and code generation of WLP4 Code.
The end product was to write a compiler that translates WLP4 code into MIPS assembly language.
WLP4 is a subset of the C++ language, and includes functions, integers, pointers, arrays, conditional statements, and while loops.
Definitely my favourite part of the compilation process was code generation.
The course instructors challenged the students to reduce the size of the MIPS program that the compiler generates. Many optimization techniques were used like Constant Folding, Constant Propogation, Strength Reduction,
and Dead Code Elimination. In the end, my compiler was the third most optimized out of over 300 students.
Sudoku Solver
February 2020
By utilizing a backtracking approach and AC3 algorithm, I was able to create a sudoku solver that solves puzzles in just a few miliseconds.
The AC3 algorithm is in place to maintain arc consistency with all the constraints, and reduce the domain size of all the variables before the
search begins. By incorporating this algorithm, I was able to reduce solve time by almost 50% when comparing it to a normal backtracking algorithm. Feel free to test out the program by cloning it on my GitHub.
Space Surfer
December 2018 - January 2019 | Unity and C#
Starting from scratch, and no knowledge of C# or Unity, I challenged myself to create a 3D video game over the span of just two weeks. The result is a game that imitates the feel of 'Temple Run', where one needs to travel through space in a rocketship while dodging asteriods of all shapes, while collecting coins.
My Website
April 2019 - Present | HTML, CSS, and jQuery
In order to increase my exposure to computer programming, and to challenge my creativity and coding skills, I decided to make a website of my own. My goal was to create a platform that displayed everything that I accomplished and more. Other than that, this project is pretty self-explanatory, since you are looking right at it.
New Venture
September 2018 - April 2019
Diving into one of my favourite projects to date, me and a group of two individuals developped and new business that would revolutionize the window cleaning industry. Our goal was to eliminate the need for manual labour, by transforming the service into automation. We conducted internal and external analyses of the market to understand the feasibility of our business, as well as creating an entire business plan and budget analysis. In the end, our group competed against 2000 other individuals, and managed to qualify for the semi-finals.
Work Experience
Web Developer
For my second coop term, I got to work at The Equitable Life of Canada as a Web Developer. The position it self was very much like a full stack position because I was working with both the backend server and frontend. The main frameworks I worked with at this position were Angular and ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET Core was used to create the server, and Angular was used to create the frontend for the web applications I worked on.
While working at Equitable I worked with many amazing people, and got to work on two amazing projects. The first project was an App Catalog, and the second was an Approval Portal. The App Catalog was a web app that showed the connections of thousands of servers, applications, and environments in an organized and structured fashion. This web app was especially useful for developers and project managers as it displayed all the technical information needed in a neat manner. The Approval Portal was a project meant to ease the deployment process. It allowed developers to become stakeholders in certain project environments, so whenever a deployment was happening, they would get notified and consequently approve the deployment.
Software Developer
For my first coop term, I had the opportunity to intern at Rocscience, an amazing company that creates the worlds leading geotechnical software. My time at this company was amazing and I had a lot to learn from it.
My big project for the term was to create a dark mode for all three of their 3D softwares, Slide3, RS3, and Examine3. In order to do this, I had to first clean up their entire UI, by developing my own user interface control system. The goal of this system is to overarch all the UI in all three softwares, so that it becomes much easier to edit and customize all the UI elements. As an example, if a developer was tasked to change the way the scroll bar was colored, rather than going through every single file and tediously hard coding a new color value, they could just change the color within the UI control system. With the UI control system now in place, I started developping the theme manager so that it could switch, control, and edit the theme while the program was running. To do this, I had to make sure that not only all the UI elements changed themes, but also the icons and viewport elements.
The core technical skills that I learned were in relation to the WPF framework, specifically how to combine XAML and C# to customize and create desktop applications. In terms of soft skills, I gained the experience of working in a scrum team environment, where the team would meet every Tuesday and Thursday to discuss what we had done, and what we plan to do. This included giving live presentations to the chief technical officer of Rocscience (Brent Corkum), and also discussing improvements for the software.