Welcome to my website! My name is Hayden, and I’m from beautiful New Brunswick, Canada. This site is meant to showcase my interests and projects, technical and otherwise. All opinions expressed on this site are my own.
I’ve had an interest in computers and programming for most of my life. I got my first laptop, an HP G60, for Christmas in 2009, when I was in the first grade. My first programming language was actually Lua, which I learned when I was in elementary school, but I haven’t used it in years. My favourite language is C, and I’m also comfortable in Java, JS, C++, Rust, and Lisp. I have a working knowledge of 6502 assembly, and learned a little bit of MIPS and RISC-V in university. I enjoy solving problems and working within constraints, and take a lot of pleasure in the act of getting a computer to do something for me.
I have a BSc in computer science with a minor in math from Mount Allison University. My thesis work was published at an IEEE conference in Estonia, and as a result my Erdős number is 4.1 While I was in university, I worked as a teaching assistant, served on the board of MtA Hacks, and was the founding president of the Mount Allison University Linux Users’ Group. I was also on Mount A’s competitive programming team, my best year being 2023 when my team and I placed first at the Atlantic Canadian Programming Contest and 19th at the ICPC NENA Regional.
Of course, I have other interests besides computers! Currently, my main hobby is amateur radio. My call sign is VE9WZ, and I’ve been licensed since 2023. I’ve also been studying German for fun since 2020, my third language after English and French. I love all kinds of music, and especially enjoy listening to it on my vintage hi-fi gear. I have a particular affinity for outsider music, especially the works of Daniel Johnston. My other interests include playing guitar and piano, board games, Old School RuneScape, collecting calculators and watches, tinkering with electronics and 3D printers, travelling, geocaching, reading, and cooking.
I’ve been self-hosting this blog since April 3, 2020. I also self-host a number of other services, most of which are over on spacehippie.ca.
If you’ve made it this far, I sincerely thank you for visiting my site and taking the time to read this! Please contact me any time!
Via Detecting and Resolving Feature Interactions in Cyber-Physical Systems Using Formal Methods (Walker, Ricker, Marchand), Inferencing and beyond: further adventures with parity-based architectures for decentralized discrete-event systems (Ricker, Lidbetter, Marchand), Additive Number Theory via Approximation by Regular Languages (Bell, Lidbetter, Shallit), and New bounds on the length of finite pierce and Engel series (Erdős, Shallit). ↩︎