Automating fast food kitchens
For over four years, I worked on the infrastructure behind Gastronomous ChronoGrill® and associated products, working on robotic development, backend implementations, and user interface design. I started working for free when I was 15 years old and was given a paid part-time position a few months after. Since then, I have been employed full-time over two summers (June - August 2024, May - August 2025), and worked part-time alongside high school and university studies.
What I did
- Wrote embedded software for a bidirectional serialization/deserialization layer for real-time communication of over 1Mbps of data at over 30Hz through WebSockets between constrained hardware and a user interface.
- Managed live logs, metrics, and input/output data on a >30 machine fleet with MySQL and Prisma ORM, ensuring data consistency with zero data loss throughout the development cycle.
- Developed live cloud-based machine monitoring infrastructure with Amazon Web Services with log and metric aggregation, event alert pipelines, and video streaming, resulting in a 75% improvement in incident counting.
- Built an internal tool for quickly processing, cleaning, and modifying small computer-generated bill-of-materials lists of over ten thousand entries with Python and Pandas, eliminating around three hours of manual spreadsheet entry labor per week.
- Helped maintain production machine monitoring infrastructure built on Amazon Web Services.
What it taught me
Gastronomous was an amazing learning experience for me as I started when I was 15 years old, and I had the opportunity to see what it's like for a Robotics as a Service business go from a prototype to servicing hundreds of restaurants around North America. Working in a rapidly-changing startup showed me that initiative and self-regulation are very important in the workplace. I learned that I am the one that knows my abilities the best, and applying them at Gastronomous meant critically thinking about the purposes of each project we started.
Read more about Gastronomous at gastronomous.ca.