About Me
Updated August 2025
Welcome to my website! My name is Hayden, and I'm from beautiful New Brunswick, Canada. I'm currently working in DevOps at a fintech startup in Saint John. This site is meant to showcase my interests and projects, technical and otherwise. All opinions expressed on this site are my own.
I graduated from Mount Allison University in May 2025 with a BSc with first-class honours in computer science and a minor in math. My thesis work was about applying ideas from theoretical computer science to the security of smart homes, and was peer-reviewed and published in the proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation in Tallinn, Estonia, which I got to attend. While studying at Mount A, I worked as a teaching assistant, and was a TA for many first- and second-year math and computer science courses. I also served on the board of MtA Hacks, Mount A's hackathon, and was the founding president of the Mount Allison University Linux Users' Group.
As an interesting aside, because of my publication, my Erdős number is 4, 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).
I've had an interest in programming for most of my life. My first programming language was actually Lua, which I learned in elementary school, but haven't used in years. The languages I use most are Java, Python, C, and JavaScript. I'm also comfortable in C++, Rust, Racket (Lisp), and some assembly. I was 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. 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.
Of course, I have other interests besides writing code and writing about code! My hobbies include amateur/ham radio (callsign VE9WZ), studying German (my third language, after English and French), theatre tech, listening to all kinds of music (my favourite band is Talking Heads), playing guitar, boardgames, Old School RuneScape, collecting calculators and watches, tinkering with electronics and 3D printers, speed typing (weird, I know - my personal best is 116 WPM), travelling, geocaching, visiting museums, reading (my favourite book series is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams), and cooking. Many of these interests have (and will continue to) come up on my blog!
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!