Christopher Kao

Christopher Kao

Software Engineer at WePay

Save Money With My Referral Codes

Today is July 10, 2020. COVID-19 cases are picking back up again; today the United States reported over 60,000 new cases for the third day in a row. I believe the economy is heading into a recession once the EDD unemployment benefit payments discontinue at the end of this
- 1 min read

Name Redux Actions After States, Not Getters and Setters

If you're using your Redux actions like getters and setters, you might as well be using something else because you are not using Redux to its full potential. Dan Abramov seems to agree: I would add that Redux is fairly useless if you treat actions as setters and couple actions
- 4 min read

iOS Widgets I Think Will Dominate

Last Monday, on June 22, 2020, Apple announced that iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and MacOS 11 would be including a new feature: widgets! I've spent the past few days reading Apple Developer's WidgetKit documentation and watching Apple's WWDC videos on widgets, and I think widgets are really cool! Photos, Podcasts,
- 4 min read

My New Job at WePay

On June 1, I started my new software engineering job at WePay, a payments processing company acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2017. Previously, I worked as a robotics software engineer at Built Robotics in the Bayview district of San Francisco; the company had to significantly downsize the team across the
- 3 min read

Juneteenth: Reflecting on the Software Engineering Industry's Racist Terms

Today is June 19, which marks the 255th anniversary of the day celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. When I first heard that JPMorgan Chase instituted a company-wide half day for Juneteenth, I was excited to enjoy a longer weekend and began thinking
- 3 min read

Near-Future Pose Estimation of an Autonomous Car Using AprilTag

Originally posted on April 30, 2019 on Github: https://github.com/mlab-upenn/future_pose_estimator. ROS package that predicts near future pose (up to 1 second) for F1/10th car in front using an April Tag. Written by Christopher Kao for EAS 499 engineering senior thesis in Spring 2019. Advised
- 19 min read

Download Free Drone Video Footage of Penn and Philadelphia

Over the years I've worked on lots of video projects for Penn student clubs. I was also an official photographer for the Office of University Communications for 4 years. My photos were used for all forms of Penn social media, primarily the Penn Instagram. I also did multiple paid drone
- 3 min read

TEDxPenn "Things I Learned From Flying Drones"

I had the opportunity to give a short 11 minute TEDxPenn talk on December 8, 2017, at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. During my second to last semester of senior year, I got to share with a 300-person audience - mainly students - things that I
- 1 min read
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