Aaron Watson

Who's this guy?

Hi There! I'm Aaron Watson

I'm twenty nine years old, currently employed as a Software Developer at Colab Software. I’ve had a passion for technology and programming all of my life, I started out in robotics club in grade eight and I could write C by the time I was in high school. I loved video games from an early age and studied Video Game Development at college in Toronto. When I returned home, I couldn't find work in the video game industry so I began my own media company that went on to produce over 8 seasons of various TV content for broadcast both Canadian and international. After five years and having my two children I knew that Media Production wasn’t something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life, so I started my career as a Software Developer.

Location: NL, Canada

Mobile(React-Native, Kotlin, Java, C#)

Web(React, Apollo, Postgres, Flask)

Adobe CS (PP, Photoshop, AE)

WPF(C#, XAML)

FPGA(Lucis, Verilog, VHDL)

C / C++ / Go

My Day

Here are some of the things I do in my day to day.

Web Development

Currently my day to day is primarily web development, writing production code using a React, Apollo, Flask, Postgres stack. I'm experienced in testing React applications using the React Testing Library and Jest. I also enjoy creating responsive UI/UX designs using the latest tools and animations and working at a great company while I do it!

Embedded Android

There was a point where we needed to make our own custom version of Android at work so I took control of it and forked off the AOSP source tree to make my own custom ROM. Since then I've made a bunch of custom binaries, modifications, and apps for the system. I've also fully automated the build system using Jenkins for automatic ROM builds and incremental OTA update generation for a CI / CD pipeline.

WPF / C# Development

I've been doing WPF development at work for years now, primarily on camera control software as well as video recording software for the offshore market. Applications are developed using C# 7 / WPF / MVVM. One of the things I've done with WPF development at work is I created an automated UI test suite using TestStack.White / XUnit and then I automated all those tests, constructed a VM image to run them and integrated the system into a Jenkins pipeline.

Android App Development

I have experience devloping Android applications in Javascript(React-native), Kotlin, Java, C#(Xamarin) as well as setting up CI / CD and automated testing using CircleCI, Travis and Jenkins. All good applications need tests and I've written plenty of automated Unit, Integration, and UI tests using Jest, Detox, React Testing Library, Espresso, XUnit, JUnit.

Electrical Engineering

I'm a bit of a hobbyist electrical engineer as well, I primarily work with digital circuits, the only analog design I've ever done had to do with guitar, either amps or analog effects pedals. I have experience with circuit design, PCB design(KiCAD/PCBnew), soldering both TH and surface mount(stencil / paste / reflow and by hand), firmware development for Arduino(ATMEL), Teensy(ARM), and even have experience with digital design using FPGAs!

Family

I have the best family, here in our home it's myself, my beautiful spouse, and our two boys. When I'm not nerding out or playing guitar I can be found with them playing, wathcing movies, hiking, or building stuff!

My Recent Projects

Here are a collection of projects I'm involved in. Some of these are from work, some are personal projects and some were created as part of training.

Colab

My contribution to this project has been a full stack role primarily React, Apollo, and Flask development.

Colab Mobile

My contribution to this project has been React-Native devlopment, creating/managing releases for Google play, and automating builds and deployments with CircleCI.