About Me

Hi! I'm Joseph Ma and I am a Software Engineer, Researcher, and Competitive Programmer!

8-year-old me got into programming because I liked to play games and what better way to enjoy gaming than by making some of my own! This got me from putting together hacky pieces of Scratch code to the slightly-less-hacky Multimedia Fusion Developer 2 to the even-more-so-less-hacky Minecraft Plugins in Java.

Now I've gotten the opportunity to work as a Software Engineer at a student-led entrepreneur factory, a start-up, a big company, and a university! My main interests for personal projects nowadays focuses on creating accessible products including a Chrome extension that changes fonts to be larger, dyslexia-friendy, and colorblind-friendly.

In my freetime, I'm starting to get back into competitive programming. I participated (and did alright) in USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) when I was in highschool, but getting into the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) seemed absolutely impossible for me and I was a bit demoralized being the only person at my school to participate. I am now in the top 30 in the US on TopCoder and the top 5 in the UK on CodeForces (these being two of the most well-known and popular competitive programming sites). Later this year (2022), I plan to participate in in all three Google Coding Competitions (HashCode, Kickstart, and CodeJam).

My interests in Software Engineering is mainly backend (though I do enjoy frontend as well! I'm actually having quite a bit of fun typing this in HTML and styling this with CSS!). I've worked with most of the common languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, Scala, Clojure, Swift, etc. and I'm always happy to learn more!

Outside of programming, I enjoy playing piano, learning languages (currently: English, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic), racing (SCCA licensed), and flying (FAA licensed)!