About Me
Updated 2025-11-11
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 attended with my supervisor. 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 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 in elementary school and used to script Roblox games, but I haven't used it in years. The languages I use most at work are BASH, JavaScript, Python, and some domain-specific languages for the tools we use. My favourite language is C. I'm also comfortable in Java, C++, Rust, and Racket (Lisp). As far as assembly languages go, I'm currently learning 6502 assembly on the Commodore 64 as a pastime, and learned some MIPS and RISC-V in university. I also know SQL, but since pure SQL is not Turing complete, I don't count it as a programming language. 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 and piano, boardgames, Old School RuneScape, collecting calculators and watches, tinkering with electronics and 3D printers, speed typing, 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!
In addition to this blog, I self-host a number of other services, most of which are over on spacehippie.ca.
If you want more granular detail about me (I also enjoy learning about strangers on the internet), here are some dedicated pages:
- My teaching experience
- My history with competitive programming
- Courses I took in university
- My preferred hardware and software
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!