Daniel Nguyen

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Third-year computer engineering co-op student at the University of Ottawa. This summer I did integration engineering at Teldio. On my own time I built MacTrack, an offline-first Android nutrition tracker, and I run a small self-hosted homelab that I treat like production.

Looking for a Winter 2027 co-op (January start, 4 to 12 months) in software, infrastructure, or hardware verification, in Ottawa or Toronto.

This term: Digital Systems II (VHDL, FPGA) and Computer Architecture II. On the side: porting my Spotify controller firmware to C on ESP-IDF, learning Rust, and building an MCP server for the homelab.

How I work, in one entry from my homelab incident log

symptom
Local models painfully slow. Assumed the 2 GB GPU was too small.
cause
The compose service had no runtime: nvidia. The container never saw the GPU. Misdiagnosed as a hardware limit for six weeks.
fix
Add the runtime and the NVIDIA env vars. Prompt eval went from 77 to 730–870 tokens/s.
rule
Before blaming hardware, prove the container can see it: docker exec <c> nvidia-smi

Every problem on the homelab gets written up this way: what I saw, what it actually was, what fixed it, and the rule so it doesn't happen twice. Three of them are in Notes.

Resume & CV

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Download: Resume (PDF) · CV (PDF)

Work

Intern Solutions Engineer (Co-op), Teldio

May – August 2026 · Ottawa

Teldio builds event-driven middleware that connects physical-security and operations systems to two-way radio and fleet software.

  • Designed and built an internal capture-and-replay testing tool that records live protocol traffic from integration modules and replays it as automated test input, so QA can validate modules without physical hardware on the bench. It's still in use after my term.
  • Contributed to five integration surfaces across access-control and intrusion-detection platforms, taking work from research through proof of concept, live validation, and handoff to R&D.
  • Bridged a vendor .NET SDK into Go modules and verified it emitted output identical to the vendor's REST API, validated against two live system versions.
  • Debugged protocol- and integration-level defects that only showed up against live systems, including an MQTT conformance issue reported upstream to the vendor.

My end-of-term review described the work as performed at the level of a junior solutions engineer rather than an intern. Details are kept general here because the specifics are Teldio's.

Computer Technician (Co-op), XPC

March – June 2023 · Toronto

Diagnosed and repaired 50+ desktops, laptops, and servers, resolving OS and hardware faults with a roughly 90% recovery rate using structured diagnostics. Built and tuned 20+ custom PCs for gaming and audio-production clients.

Projects

MacTrack, an offline-first Android nutrition tracker

MacTrack food log screen showing the week strip, remaining macros, and a logged chicken entry

The load-bearing decision: a logged entry is a frozen nutrient snapshot plus provenance, so editing a food later never rewrites what you ate last Tuesday. Eight schema migrations on, nothing in my own log has moved. Case study · Source

Homelab, eleven containers on a repurposed laptop

Homelab dashboard showing CPU, memory, GPU and storage panels above the running services

The entire exposure model is one line: the domain's DNS points at a private address, so off the network the names resolve to nothing reachable. No port forwarding, no public service to keep patched, and the same hostnames and certificates from anywhere over Tailscale. Case study · Compose files and incident log

YearProjectLink
2026MacTrack Offline-first Android nutrition trackerRepo · Case study
2026Homelab Self-hosted infrastructure, incident log includedRepo · Case study
2026Project Echo Protocol capture-and-replay tester — internal QA tool, Teldio co-opInternal
2026This site Hand-written HTML/CSS, GitHub PagesRepo
2025Spotify Mini Controller ESP32 controller: soldered button matrix, Wi-Fi, Spotify Web API; firmware being ported to C on ESP-IDF—
2025OTAMS Tutoring appointment system — Android, Java, Firebase. SEG2105 group projectRepo

Notes

From the incident log. Longer write-ups of the ones where I was wrong before I was right.