Who am I?
For the past couple of decades, software, hardware, sports (skiing, scuba diving, rally car driving), and visual arts (photography and motion pictures) have been an integral part of my professional and recreational life. Over time, these have combined together in a fusion of skills, experiences, a desire to continually improve, and to find opportunities to apply one or more of these skills together.
My interests are in Agile and Scrum – improving software delivery by coaching great teams and creating agile organizations; Software Development – working with the latest cloud technology, finding great tools that work to increase team agility, and writing robust software that creates great customer experiences; Customer Experience – digging deep into what makes a great one, why some companies are great at it, why others aren’t, how to build trust and engage customers; Design – creating software or tangible objects that look beautiful and work well; Storytelling – telling great stories through photos and movies in the form of documentaries and wedding films; and Giving Back – making small differences in our world through what I do.
If there is a common thread, it’s about applying the power of visuals, technology, teamwork, and the intangibles (often just hard work and customer obsession) that create great experiences that customers will want to come back again and again for.
Project Sampler
Flinks
Flinks’s product is one of those products that’s widely used but unknown. Over 700 financial tech firms use Flinks services, mostly the Connect product which helps transfer a client’s financial data from banks securely.
Why is this useful? Obtaining financial data can help the fintechs with assessing the level of risk when providing a loan, and Flinks provides the interface to the banks to help determine the risk. For example, the last paycheque amounts can be checked, and any outflows can be categorized to determine risk levels in a deeper way than a simple credit score.
Such functionality comes with great responsibility for security. As well, the number of clients can present intricate scaling problems because some clients may only use a few connections a month, while others may number in the hundreds of thousands.
Other intricacies also surface depending on the technique used to pull account data. One method is page scraping, where the user is logged in to the bank website and the contents of the browser are accessed to get the account details. This is a potentially fragile but unfortunately necessary technique as many banks do not provide easy interfaces to get at their client data. Page scraping is extremely fragile if not handled properly as simple cosmetic page changes can break a scraper; luckily, our technology relies on quick manual handling with humans-in-the-loop and (soon) AI-driven adaptive methods.
Some banks ironically also put up security blocks to prevent such access so a cat-and-mouse game emerges and some exotic proxy technology is used to make Flinks’s browsers adequately impersonate a live client. Luckily many of Flinks’s banking partners do provide secured ways of doing this and the browser scraping technique will slowly go away. The US banks are particularly more advanced than Canadian banks as they have readily implemented OpenBanking OAuth-based standards for account access.
Flinks’s other products include Guaranteed EFT, a faster way to process electronic funds transfer; Uploads, a way to provide account information from PDF statements, which also includes ways to ensure the statements have not been tampered with digitally.
AI / ML and data ingestion permeate many products at Flinks. Specifically ML is used to help categorize transactions based upon vague descriptions (think of a transaction description in your credit card or checking account statement which might just be the name of the merchant, and how it might be sorted into groceries, eating out, entertainment, utility payment, or other categories of interest).
Awesense
Awesense’s product unifies a GIS mapping product with time-series data to help deliver insights for energy grids. Consider the challenges involved in collecting millions of energy data readings (voltage and current across three phases) from electrical meters (usually 4 data points an hour) that are then coupled with the electrical grid consisting of assets like transformers, lines, power stations, relays, switches, and so on, which are connected together. Grid connectivity also have a sense of directionality, necessitating the concept of upstream components and downstream components, and even component states (parts of the grid may be active only at certain times).
The challenge with time-series data has always been about summarizing the large volumes of data in useful ways; for example, daily, monthly, yearly. Awesense created custom PostgreSQL code and storage methods to minimize the data storage while providing the ability to summarize data.
APIs and special functions are then available to help unify the GIS and time series data through SQL queries which is a great compatibility mechanism allowing use in popular tools like Jupyter notebooks and PowerBI.
A sandbox mechanism allows potential clients to kick the tires on the platform, providing a secure development environment with test data that they can try integrations with the SQL and REST APIs.
To help inspire and jumpstart clients, a Use Case Library was assembled containing industry-specific use cases with sample notebooks and other information. The dozens of available use cases include capacity planning for EVs, managing wildfire risks, energy theft detection, detection of incorrect wiring, energy balancing.
Innovative Travel Solutions, a division of the Vancouver Airport Authority
BorderXpress kiosks – biometric, Windows-based custom kiosk software and hardware for border entry (used at YVR, YUL, YHZ airports, Barbados, Cyprus), older versions all throughout the U.S. (blue kiosks), and for the Trusted Traveler Program (TTP / Nexus). Kiosks are accessibility-compliant and provide travel document scanning, RFID, facial and fingerprint verification, custom question workflow and interface with law enforcement / border authority systems.
ITS also develops concepts like battery operated kiosks and other innovations for improving airport passenger experience and capacity.
Technology stack: .NET, WPF, Redis. Custom-designed hardware enclosures. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Hardware as a Service (HaaS) model.
London Drugs PhotoLab
photolab.londondrugs.com – web storefront, payment systems, in-store photo kiosk, and distributed lab management systems for order fulfillment across 70+ locations. UI/UX improvements, web services implementation, horizontal scale out and site stabilization.
The site was an early adopter of Social Media APIs for obtaining photos from Facebook, Google, Instagram. Technology: ASP.NET, memcached, SQL Server, Commerce Server.
Surrey International Writers’ Conference
SiWC.ca – Surrey International Writers’ Conference, arguably the premier professional development conference of its kind, and held here in Metro Vancouver. I built the conference management system for managing workshops, conference rooms, attendees and presenters.
SiWC went virtual for 2020 in response to CoVid-19, and the site pivoted from an informational site to a mission-critical hub for attendees and presenters, containing Zoom conference links, video, and individualized logged-in experiences for attendees and presenters.
Technology: LAMP on AWS EC2, WordPress, PHP, custom plug-ins with shortcodes and Gutenberg blocks, custom form types and custom fields.
London Air Services
londonair.com – Private jet and helicopter charters using WordPress custom theme, and creating virtual hangar tours.
Richmond Go Kart Track
richmondgokarts.com – Site SEO, PPC, photo/video, graphics design, content creation and updates (business closed in 2019 – internet archive link provided)
Walas PHOENIX West, Dudoc, World of Walas
walasphoenixwest.com – German urban renewal project featuring the redevelopment of a decommissioned blast furnace site in the Ruhr Valley; using a custom responsive theme, multi-language (English, German, Dutch) support, Gutenberg blocks, and parent-child theme support designed to rapidly customize new sites inheriting from base parent design.
worldofwalas.com – Sustainable urban development site; augmenting and stabilizing existing theme, adding SEO.
Photo and Film
Current public video projects are on www.vimeo.com/martinchung
Star Wars: Ascension (cinematographer, VFX)
Pendulum (cinematographer/camera operator)
No Good Deed (cinematographer, VFX)
Engagement Chicken (cinematographer/sound/producer)
Cyrus and the Wallet (VFX supervisor)
Video and Photo reel from 2016
Personal Info
LinkedIn Profile
Github (containing mostly personal test projects experimenting with iOS and cloud deployments. No customer-facing stuff, unfortunately!)
Scrum.org Trainer Listing
www.studioimpossible.com (old wedding photography site)
~ Martin Chung