Samuel Wong

Ramblings of a rocket scientist turned web developer

About Me

Hi there.

My name is Samuel Wong. I’m a builder-creator, part-time tinkerer, life-long learner, and a persistent pursuer of the important things in life, which I happen to believe is God, family, and community of all forms.

I’m always looking for a worthwhile project or team to join! Working on something awesome? I’d like to be a part of it. Here are some more facts about me:

I live in Toronto.

Toronto is a fantastic place, and we’re one of the most technological-advanced cities in the world. According to the Star, Toronto has one of the highest penetrations of the Internet in the world and we’re the Facebook capital of the world. I grew up in North York, and I spend much of my time in Markham – home of AMD, Honeywell, Netfirms, and other great tech companies. I’m also a short subway ride away from the downtown core.

I’m a rocket scientist.

I went to school at the University of Toronto, in the Engineering Science program, in the Aerospace stream. EngSci is the best engineering program in Canada, hands-down. We do things other people do in grad school. Other students buy robot parts and build/assemble a robot for their design project – we do everything from scratch, down to the last solder joint. Four years and a lot of sleepless nights later, I got my Bachelors of Applied Science in May 2006.

After graduating, I went to graduate school at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, for a Masters of Applied Science in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Combustion. We’re seriously world-class, and we have the supercomputer resources to prove it. When it was first built in 2009, it ranked #16 on the TOP500 list, which is an annual ranking of supercomputing facilities around the world.

I was originally slated to do my thesis on “Large Eddy Simulation of Premixed Turbulent Combustion using the G-equation Approach with Embedded Boundaries.” The goal of the research was to build an accurate computer simulation of methane gas burning in air. Why do we want this? With an accurate computer model, we can predict pollutant formation, heat release, flame geometry, and other interesting combustion information, and thus provide a tool for engineers to design more efficient combustion engines for aircraft, cars, etc.

However, life didn’t go as planned. When does it ever? My research was roadblocked at a fundamental level, and after working on this topic for three years, I abandoned the topic. I took on a proposal from Zephyr Alternative Power to develop a CFD simulation of their vertical-axis wind turbine, with the goal of finding new, more efficient, geometries. After working on this for two years, I handed in my thesis entitled A Parallel Adaptive-mesh Method for Predicting Flows Through Vertical Axis Wind Turbines in January 2011.

I’m involved in the community.

I contribute to a number of Stack Exchange sites such as StackOverflow, SuperUser, and AskUbuntu. See my network profile. I volunteered for AndroidTO, I attend the occasional MobileStartupsTO meetup, and I’m looking to join an Android, Linux, and Rails user group in the near future.

I’m in it for the challenge and I’m constantly learning.

Technologies change quickly. Here’s how I keep tabs on everything:

I also buy a lot of books on whatever I’m working on at the moment. I love the Head First series, Pragmatic Bookshelf, and O’Reilly. I love loading up my Kindle with tech books.

I’m a geek, through and through.

I dabble in everything tech. One day, I’d like to get an Arduino and make a garage door status LED indicator. Or put together a server monitoring traffic light. Or design and build a remote-control R/C airplane from scratch. Or a Dalek.