Hi, I'm Leander Rodrigues

Received a B.A.Sc. Honours Nanotechnology Engineering at the University of Waterloo. My program gives me the opportunity to work with/study the latest and greatest in tech, research and science, while learning the fundamentals of engineering. Pretty cool if you ask me. Self-taught (unless online courses count) dev stuff tho.

Another Wes Bos course, this time focusing on implementing the latest and greatest design patterns with React, all with a slick, modern stack. GraphQL + Prisma + Node on the backend, and React with Apollo Client on the frontend. Next.js actually powers the React app as well, giving some added speed, server-side rendering and easy routing!

Completed BOTH (yeah you read that write 💪💪) of the courses on creating, and implementing a GraphQL API. The backend course focused on designing the API with Node.js and Prisma, while the frontend course was all about interacting with it (with React and Apollo Client). It ended up coming together in sick, well-implemented clone of Hacker News!

An introductory course to Node.js (+ Express) taught by the web-acclaimed Wes Bos. In it, I built a fully functional restaurant review service, with a database interface, clean, server-templated UI, and Google Maps capabilities. It even enforced some awesome MVC design patterns!

A beginner's project-driven React development course taught by Wes Bos. It covers everything from ES6, to Webpack, and even Firebase Authentication. It covers lifecycle methods, state management, and application structure while creating an application to manage a simple fish market!

An introductory course to using React which was focused on the basics, but sparked my interest in the JavaScript framework, and set a foundation for future projects and endeavors.

During my free time of my second coop term, I decided that I wanted to get back into the programming world, and searched for some good courses/resources online. About 2.5 months later, I'd completed a series of projects/challenges in this intensive course covering the basics of web development.

Judged the Project Program competition for the University of Waterloo Computer Science and Data Science clubs! The competition was between first year students who worked alongside upper year mentors to develop applications in about a month. Judging was done across a variety of categories (e.g. extensibility, complexity, etc.) to award the three lucky teams!

Blueprint is an initiative at the University of Waterloo to provide tech for nonprofits. A bunch of times every week, teams get together and work on building cool stuff for social good, and I'm a part of it! We work in Agile sprints, providing web apps, analysis tools and infrastructure to nonprofits every term - free of charge!

With a few other volunteers from the team of developers from Accenture Technology Canada, I was able to help Grade 3's and 4's write their first few lines of JavaScript, all for the #HourOfCode initiative! Answering basic questions, helping them get started, and explaining stuff like 'if statements', and helping get those 'future-programmer' wheels turning.

Joined a team of representatives from Accenture Technology Canada in running through workshops about 'Design Thinking' for future University students. As one of the youngest reps, I also got the chance to talk about what they can expect at the University of Waterloo, and the opportunities that await them as young women in STEM fields!

After a long 4 months at school, I wanted to get back into programming in a big way. I started coding for at least an hour a day for 100 Days, and lo and behold, I got a bunch of stuff done!

DRW sponsored Hack The North with a data restructuring/parsing coding challenge, the winner of which would get an awesome branded speaker. Well, after a little over 20 minutes, I managed to take that speaker home!

As part of my term with Accenture Canada, I traveled to Chicago, Illinois to complete a two-week intensive training on the basics of technology development. As part of it, I received a certification in professional agile software development for completing a three-day accredited course!

Earned a big ol' entrance scholarship of $2000.00 upon my admission to the University of Waterloo since my high school grade point average was greater than 90%.