Base Camp
Hi - I’m Ali, an engineer from Toronto. I’m in business and tech. I enjoy building systems.
Lately that’s meant shipping with AI, watching tech Twitter go bonkers, and giving back to the communities I love. Before that I spent years working and excelling in sales.
Outside of work - my family, fitness, football (the real one), and Rocket League (top 0.05%).
B.Eng. - Computer Engineering & Management
Class of 2026
Hamilton, ON
The City
Famzy Inc.Nov 2025 - PresentBuilding a mobile family OS with an AI assistant that drives every feature. Live on the App Store.
Closed 13 residential solar contracts in 45 days through door-to-door outreach.
First-line IT support; co-led a UniFlow print rollout across France, Canada, and the US.
Managed records for 30+ clients and automated bank-statement reconciliation in Python.
Secured four $100k+ workforce-solutions contracts and led a team of three reps.
Sold 68 TELUS smart-home systems in one summer across ~3,400 door-knocks.
Door-to-door residential window-cleaning quotes with on-the-spot pricing.
Retail floor sales and customer service.
The Stadium
PolsaA Rocket League esports app. Schedules, brackets, standings and rosters for the pro scene, plus a friends feed that shows what everyone is playing right now.
Rocket League esports has a huge following but no official app, and no public API for its pro data. Polsa fills that gap with two clients over one backend. The iOS app is built with Expo and React Native, the overlay in Rust, and the backend runs on Cloudflare Workers with D1. The pro data is stitched together from start.gg, blast.tv, Twitch and Liquipedia and matched into single team and player profiles, and a scheduled job syncs it into BigQuery so the standings keep their history. Every API key stays on the server, so when a source changes, one deploy fixes it for everyone.
The Stadium, The Pitch
A Rocket League bot that taught itself to play through reinforcement learning.
Franky is built in Python with RLGym and PyTorch. Rather than scripted plays, it learned positioning, speed and boost management from a reward system, and adapts to how the opponent plays.
The Old Ivy Tree
An AI study platform built as my engineering capstone. Course planning, deadlines, study help and early career tools in one place.
Course progress and upcoming deadlines, shown with sample coursework.
Students already have everything they need, spread across syllabi, slides and emails. Ivy pulls it into one system, with the OpenAI API doing the reading. Built by a team of five on Next.js and TypeScript, with typed data models and modular components so everyone could work in parallel. The hard part turned out to be trust, making sure every date and deadline was right so people would actually rely on the schedule it produced.
The Garage
An RC car that drives itself with a camera and an ultrasonic sensor.
Course hardware reference from the McMaster COMPENG 4DS4 manual, p. 3.
Built in a team of three. The sensing runs in Python on a Raspberry Pi, the motor and servo control in C++ on a PX4 flight controller with uORB, and the two talk over MAVLink. The camera decides where to steer and the ultrasonic sensor decides how fast.
The Radio Mast
A real-time FM radio written in C++. It takes the raw signal from a cheap USB dongle and turns it into mono and stereo audio.
Receiver architecture from the COMPENG 3DY4 project guide, p. 4 (course reference).
Written for the Computer Systems Integration course at McMaster in a team of four. All of the signal processing is our own C++, the filters, the FM demodulator, the phase-locked loop for stereo and the resamplers, and a Python model of the same chain was the reference for every stage. It has four operating modes at different sample rates, from 960 kHz to 2.4 MHz in and 40 to 48 kHz out.
The Chip Yard
An image decompressor built in hardware. Verilog on an Altera DE2-115 FPGA, decoding compressed images and drawing them on a VGA screen.
Our cycle-by-cycle hardware schedule, from the team report, p. 1.
Built in a pair. Compressed data arrives over UART into SRAM, the Verilog decodes it through dequantization, an inverse DCT, upsampling and YUV to RGB conversion, and a VGA controller draws the result. All of it had to fit the board's four multipliers and keep them busy, which it does, with the colour stage at 78% utilization against a 75% target.
The Counting House
A payroll system for an accounting firm, with separate portals for accountants and their clients.
Started during my data analyst internship at Vanguard Financial and handed over to the next intern to continue development. Two logins, two sets of API routes and separate query permissions keep the accountant and client sides apart, with JWT handling the authentication. TypeScript and PostgreSQL on the backend, React on the front.
The Survey Post
A room scanner built from a LiDAR sensor on a stepper motor. It sweeps the space and draws it as a 3D point cloud.
A preserved wireframe view from the hallway scan.
A VL53L1X time-of-flight sensor on a 28BYJ-48 stepper, driven by an MSP432E401Y microcontroller. The firmware is C, and the reconstruction on the PC is Python with NumPy and Open3D.
The Clinic
A pacemaker model that paces the heart's chambers under different modes, with a desktop app to control it live.
The Python GUI I built: selecting a pacing mode. Captured locally without hardware.
Built in a team of five for a software engineering course. The pacing logic lives in MATLAB and Simulink, the device controller in Python and Tkinter, with pySerial carrying the settings between them so changes take effect while the model runs.
Back at Base Camp
A role, a project, or a rabbit hole worth going down. Whatever it is, say hi.
ali-raza@live.ca