Hey, I'm Eric Sheen ⚛
I'm a full-stack developer, researcher, and community builder. My latest work was at Descope as a DevRel Engineer, where I built & led a variety of open-source projects to increase the adoption of our authentication product. I also wrote a lot of blogs.
I'm currently living in Waterloo, ON, Canada. It's not a city with skylines and tall buildings but it's a peaceful community with lots of green.
My journey started during my grade 8 year, learning the basics of Java and Android development. Then, progressed toward ML and full-stack web development. During high school, you would catch me at hackathons, working in research and doing a few SWE internships.
I spent my four years of high school working in startups and research labs. My most notable works include engineering/research at CheaprEats, SkyWatch, UWaterloo, and Harvard LIT lab. I am also involved in hackathons and communities like TEDx and Velocity. Read more about it below.
This upcoming 2023-2024 term, I'm back living in residence and studying at the University of Waterloo for Software Engineering. Planning on joining some compelling clubs and continuing to make some meaningful friends.
♔ / Experiences
Descope
DevRel Engineer (Founding intern)
May 2023 - August 2023
The first intern hired at Descope. I'm hacking away at open-source projects, a few of them actively being used by customers (most notably Descope Explorer). The Hackathon Template is expected to be featured on Vercel templates (https://vercel.com/templates) soon! My intuition for design and functional interfaces has led me to be the go-to guy for design in the team. Descope has raised $53 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, TechAviv, J Ventures, Cerca, Unusual Ventures, Silicon Valley CISO Investments and individual investors CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz and Microsoft chairman John W. Thompson.
SkyWatch
Software Developer
July 2021 - September 2022
A splendid experience! Worked on various teams and roles: Automation, ML, and API/SDK. I was the youngest hire at the company at 17 years old. I got to work on the backend of the cutting-edge EOD delivery (earth observation data). Most notable works include designing and building their SDK for the EarthCache API and building an internal satellite search engine tool for labelling, reporting, and viewing satellite imagery. It's currently being used across the entire company, and interns now build upon the tool. Joined during an explosive time of growth during their series A. SkyWatch has raised over $30 million from Drive Capital, BDC ICE Venture Fund, Golden Ventures, Space Capital, and Bullpen Capital.
EarthCache
Harvard LIT Lab
Student Researcher
July 2021 - September 2022
I led the software side of the MMCA project which aims to visualize the multimodal indicators of collaboration that have been identified by social scientists over the last decade. A fascinating topic on how multimodal learning changes our behaviour and approach to learning. The MMCA project visually displays this impact in six layers (each layer being more broad), each node being the mode (e.g. eye motion, facial expressions, etc.). Worked under under Dr. Bertrand Schneider at Harvard LIT lab. I was inducted as the youngest official member of the lab at 18 years old among 120+ members including Harvard PhDs and undergrads.
CheaprEats
Lead Frontend Developer
August 2020 - November 2020
My first formal software experience. Worked with a team of 5 to develop a virtual receipt builder (this was during COVID-19). Learned a lot about working in a team and frontend development: React, styled-components and Tailwind.
Crunchbase
University of Waterloo
Research Assistant
July 2020 - September 2020
Worked under Dr. Gordon V. Cormack to create a search engine for scientific literature on COVID-19 by analyzing and labelling 3000+ documents. This was to contribute to increasing the document relevancy model accuracy of S-CAL’s multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm.
Participation in TREC 2020 COVID Track Using Continuous Active Learning
♘ / Speaking
★ Youtube: Your Fear Hides a World Full of Possibility
Honoured to have given a TEDx talk on how we can overcome the fear of failure and maximize potential. Talked about my struggles when working on ambitious projects and how I overcame them. It was an interesting process that involved script writing, and editors, and I definitely got better at public speaking (which I love).
★ Youtube: Intro to Python: Build a Project!
Invited to deliver a workshop on an Intro to Python. There were 80+ live listeners in the discord call, and I had a fun time interacting with everyone and getting to know people and their ideas.
★ Youtube: Build a Waitlist App With Descope Flows and Airtable
This is part of my work at Descope where I build a waitlist for your startup/app with authentication.
♖ / Blogs
Add Descope Authentication to a Next.js 13 App Using NextAuth
Next.js 12 vs Next.js 13: What's the Difference?
A Deep Dive into the Descope Django Plugin
Adding Descope Authentication to a Django App
Build a Waitlist App With Descope Flows and Airtable
Adding Descope Authentication to a Flask App
Adding Descope Authentication to a React+Flask App
Add User Information to JWT Response Using Descope Flows
♗ / Projects
I get a lot of messages on how I'm able to get these internships and the general processes of these interviews, so I created Easy Intern to help upcoming developers succeed in getting their first internship. If want to know anything more specific, feel free to message me on Discord or LinkedIn! If you find this helpful, give it a share!
Fetching data in JavaScript can be quite annoying. You need to async-await data, handle errors, and then log that data. This can be a good 30 lines of code. In Python, you can fetch data with a simple 'request. get(URL)' and that's just one line (https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/quickstart/). I built api-request-js to accomplish the exact same effect. Now you can 'npm install api-request-js' and do a 'request.getRequest(url, path).' It peaked at like 14 installs/week if I recall correctly.
♙ / Startups / Affiliations
Studye
Inspired by the boredom of my grade 10 history course which included hours of reading through tedious textbooks, and historical records... Studye was my first go at building a Saas startup: Grammarly for text summarization. Studye was a data extraction & summarization app for PDFs, documents, images, and web pages to condense information for studying by providing notes, keywords, and summaries. Made a ton of mistakes but also learned a lot about building something from the ground up. Conducted 20+ user interviews, had 80+ users at the peak, and learned a lot about NLP (extractive text summarization, tokenization, normalization). Met with local founders in the ed-tech space and gained a lot of wisdom. I would highly encourage other devs to tackle a problem you're passionate about, build in public, onboard users, and experience something new. There is no true failure where there are lessons that can be learned.
RIP Heroku free tier. Although I'm moving to Vercel and Netlify, Heroku is (in my opinion), one of the most impressive cloud deployment paradigms of all time. Before Vercel and others came out, there was Heroku. Good deployment times, an abundant amount of add-ons, real-time logs, Heroku CLI, and this arbitrary concept of "dynos." Hope to see a comeback for Heroku on the global stage.
♕ / Photos of the Week
☘ Last updated 08-27-2023
Email: easheen [@] uwaterloo.ca
Old website: https://ericsheen.netlify.app/
© 2023 Eric Sheen