βΉ go back
Hi! I'm Emilie.
You probably know me as Kewbish. I'm a student and software developer, especially passionate about the web, distributed systems, and human-computer interaction. I focus on Web-based technologies, extending them to accelerate development and integrating them to serve unique needs. My goal is to make software more resilient, effective for collaboration, and seamless.
Experience and Awards
π¦ University of Cambridge
Sep. - Dec. 2024
Visiting Researcher under Dr. Martin Kleppmann in collaboration with Ink & Switch. I created Kintsugi, a decentralized E2EE key recovery scheme allowing users to recover their key from a password while protecting from brute-force or recovery node collusion. I also developed a prototype in Rust with Tauri and libp2p. Paper available by request, as it’s currently under submission to a workshop.
π©πͺ Summer School on Distributed and Replicated Environments
Sep. 2024
Attended the DARE 2024 ACM Europe Summer School, a one-week summer program in distributed systems combining theory and practice. The program is aimed at masterβs students and PhD students interested in the field of distributed systems and programming languages, and I was the only undergraduate student accepted to attend this year.
πΈ Stripe
May - Aug. 2024
Intern on Stripe’s Document Database APIs and Reconciler team. I worked on reducing MongoDB costs β I unlocked multi-tenancy for Stripe’s databases by developing and deploying a Go component across the fleet, reducing AWS costs by an estimated ~$450K/year and eliminating 200 days/year of cross-functional waiting time and ops toil. I also refactored internal PostgreSQL infra to use serializable transactions to avoid race condition.
π¦ UBC Systopia
Jan. - Apr. 2024
Research assistant under Professor Ivan Beschastnikh and Finn Hackett on the DCal project. Building on prior work in the PGo project to generate implementations of distributed systems from formally verified models, I created a Rust library to support similar system generation via an eventual compiler from the TLA+ modelling language to Rust. The library provides extensively customizable generic methods and supports lazy evaluation.
βοΈ Cloudflare
May - Aug. 2023
Intern on Cloudflare’s Queues team. I added debugging features for Queues to the Cloudflare dashboard, which had a feature conversion rate of 50+%. I also performed service-wide migrations with Kubernetes and Helm, introduced E2E testing to the Queues frontend UI with Cypress, and created Grafana dashboards to track feature usage metrics.
π©βπ¬ UBC D-Lab
Jan. 2023 - Apr. 2024
Research assistant under Professors Dongwook Yoon, Ivan Beschastnikh, and Cleidson de Souza. I explored the characterization and identification of software engineering workflow types via network analysis, writing visualization scripts and queries in Python and Neo4j for the quantitative aspects of analysis. Our paper, ‘Revealing Software Development Work Patterns with PR-Issue Graph Topologies’, will appear in FSE 2024.
β Replit
May - Aug. 2022
Intern on Replit’s Workspace team. I worked alongside another intern to own an end-to-end migration of the GitHub import flow to Nix. Our work sped the flow up 2x and made Replit’s import tool twice as fast than even Microsoft’s GitHub Codespaces product. I also worked on a visual configuration editor for .replit files.
π¬ Summer Research School
Jul. - Aug. 2021
Attended the prestigious Summer Research School in Bulgaria. There, a group of forty Bulgarian and international students pursue a research topic of their choice for three weeks, ultimately developing a formal paper and defending their findings with a presentation. Under the guidance of Ms. Pressiana Marinova, I worked on an inquiry project on probablistic primality testing and the analysis of a probablistic AKS variant. Read the paper or view source code.
π Google Code-in
Dec. 2019
In 2019, I was a Google Code-in winner, under Liquid Galaxy. For two months, I completed many open source tasks, and eventually won the competition. I’m one of Canada’s ten winners to date and the youngest Canadian winner. As well: I was the youngest winner in 2019. Pretty cool.
π Liquid Galaxy
Since Feb. 2020
Intern at Liquid Galaxy, a Google-backed open source organization focused on interactive, immersive geographical displays. There, I develop documentation, webinar screencasts, and various other media, such as blog posts and installation tutorials. During summer 2020, I acted as a trainee mentor in several GSoC projects, as well as testing them.
πΈ Grant For The Web Hackathon Winner
May - Jun. 2020
Won the Grant For The Web Hackathon under the category Creative Catalysts, hosted by Dev.to, Mozilla, Coil, and Creative Commons. Created a revenue-sharing library from vanilla JS.
π vhHacks
Sep. 2020 - May 2021
Team member at vhHacks, the Vancouver High School Hackathon Association. I’m currently working on several Learn Day workshops and developing fun tooling for our 2021 hackathon.
π Canada Learning Code
Oct. 2019 - Jun. 2021
Teen Ambassador at Canada Learning Code, a national organization reaching out to bring tech to women, girls, LGBTQ+ members, and focusing on making tech inclusive to all. There, I participate in team-building leadership activities, and learned effective mentorship skills.
π Vancouver Public Library
Sep. 2018 - Jun. 2021
Teen Advisory Member at the Vancouver Public Library, the local library serving Vancouver community members. There, I work to organize youth events, purchase youth books, provide feedback on programs, and attend biweekly youth meetings.
Currently studying at: UBC
The University of British Columbia is one of the world's leading science universities. There, I'm a third-year pursuing an Honours Degree in Computer Science from the Faculty of Science.
There, I:
- am one of the ten 2021 Schulich Leader Scholarship recipients at the school. The Schulich Leader Scholarships are Canada's most prestigious STEM scholarship, valued at between $80k-100k CAD. Selected from over 1500 nominees across Canada, 100 scholarships are awarded nationally.
- am Co-Vice-President External at the UBC Computer Science Student Society, connecting students with industry partners through workshops and career fair events. I previously served as Vice-President Academic and led the team of webmasters as well as a team of academic officers, working to improve digital and academic experiences for students.
- am taking a gap year for the 2024-2025 academic year in order to do research internships at the University of Cambridge and at Sorbonne UniversitΓ©.