Nima Boscarino

Contact

Hello! I'm a developer advocate at Hugging Face based in Vancouver, Canada. I have a B.Sc. in Computing Science from SFU, with a minor in Education (Curriculum and Instruction)! I love work that blends my interests in technology ethics, education, and public policy.

Previously, I was a Machine Learning Software Engineer at Borealis AI, an educator at a bootcamp and a non-profit, and a contractor for various local start-ups. You can find me on LinkedIn or email me at nima.boscarino (at) gmail.com

If you're a junior developer (or just someone entering the tech sector) feel free to reach out! I love helping people scope out personal projects, practice for tech interviews, and learn new technologies.

Development

Hugging Face

Machine Learning Developer Advocate - Q2 2022-Present

As of the end of March 2022, I'm starting a brand new role as an ML Developer Advocate over at Hugging Face! While I'm very sad to be leaving my old role at Borealis (and my wonderful colleagues 😭) I am thrilled to be moving into a role where I'll have the opportunity to deepen my ML knowledge, be part of an exciting and vibrant community, and go back to my roots in education.

I'll have a better description of my role here once I get started, but I'll likely get to develop some very interesting educational ML content!

Borealis AI

Machine Learning Software Engineer - Q3 2020-Q1 2022

Borealis AI is an Aritifical Intelligence research centre created by the Royal Bank of Canada. I joined the Vancouver lab as MLSE in July 2020! This was my first time working in the field of AI, learned a ton about the processes and practices involved in deploying machine learning services to production. Through the projects that I was a part of I got to work on refactoring model code with researchers, writing application-level code for the ML services, performing DevOps tasks, building out inference and training pipelines, and onboarding and mentoring new team members.

It was very rewarding to have been part of an organization that cares so much about ethical AI, and I took every opportunity I could to gain a deeper understanding of the issues that developers and users of real-life modern AI systems encounter.

Tandem

Personal Project - April 2020

This app is available on the App Store!

To stretch my skills with React Native I decided to design and develop a small iOS application. Enter, Tandem! Tandem makes exploring Vancouver by bike fun and easy. Simply define a radius and how many markers you'd like to generate, and the app will place markers randomly along Vancouver's bike paths. For navigation help, you can open the markers up directly in Google Maps as waypoints.

This was a fun project to learn about App Store submissions, Testflight deliveries, and to further my learning on PostGIS. If you'd like to leave feedback or require support with the app, please contact me at nima.boscarino (at) gmail.com.

Scout

Senior Developer - Q4 2019-Q1 2020

I joined DomoMi to help their developers with their Slack App, "Homer". We kicked off a brand new project in late 2019: a real-estate analytics platform called Scout!

I was in charge of requirements engineering, designing the architecture (woo, microservices!), DevOps, technical project management, managing the junior developers, and of course development. This was by far the most ambitious project I'd taken on yet, and it was tons of fun!

Neighborli

Contract Developer - Q4 2019-Present

This volunteering platform was built on a contract for an instructor at a local university. I recruited one of my old students, and together we crushed out a solid project.

Neighborli features snazzy things like location-based queries and WebSockets through Rails.

This was an excellent opportunity to work on my technical management skills. We delivered an ambitious product on time, within budget, and to the client's utmost satisfaction!

TalentMarketplace

Contract Developer - Q1-Q2 2019

I was hired as a contractor to rebuild the user profile page for TalentMarketplace.com. Along with a junior developer, I set off on converting a full-stack Django feature to a SPA-style React project with Redux for state management. This was my first time acting as a senior to another developer!

Spare Labs

Software Developer - Q2-Q3 2017

Spare Labs develops smart transit and mobility solutions. As a developer at Spare Labs I developed mobile and web apps to integrate with the Spare mobility platform. This was my first exposure to a SPA framework like React, and it's where I got some incredibly valuable experience with Redux, Redux-Sagas, while deepening my backend skills with Laravel and Express.

Hatfield Consultants

Web Application Developer - Q2 2016-Q2 2017

I had the opportunity to complete an 8-month Co-op with the Environmental Information Systems team at Hatfield between 2016 and 2017. My work consisted of full-stack development with ASP.NET MVC. I mostly worked on a web-mapping system, which included creating a plugin for Leaflet.js to allow users to collaboratively add markup to maps in real-time using Socket.IO.

Teaching

Lighthouse Labs

Lead Instructor, Curriculum Maintainer

I started teaching at Lighthouse Labs in 2018, and spent 2019 as the Lead Instructor for the Vancouver branch. I had the privilege of mentoring hundreds of students on their way to becoming junior developers! During my tenure I organized and hosted a variety of meetups, workshops, and panels.

While at Lighthouse I worked on curriculum for several marketing projects (e.g. the 21-Day Coding Challenge!) and delivered a 3-week corporate training bootcamp for HomeAway in Austin, Texas.

I stopped teaching full-time at the beginning of 2020, and maintained the curriculum for the web bootcamp until July 2020.

Ethical Tech YVR

Meetup series

In 2019 I ran a series of meetups and workshops centred around exploring ethics in technology. We touched on many different topics, such as privacy, anthropomorphic tech, and data-driven learning systems. For Vancouver Startup Week we had a special panel on accessibility.

I kept notes for some of the events up on EthicalYVR.tech. Keep an eye out for more events in 2020!

Canada Learning Code

Conference Instructor, Content Developer, SME

The first class I ever taught was for Canada Learning Code in 2016, and it resulted in education quickly becoming my passion! I've been involved in numerous initiatives with the organization over the years.

In 2018 I had the opportunity to travel around Canada to teach professional development conferences for primary and secondary school teachers, which was a life-changing experience. I've developed a Raspberry Pi workshop, hosted classes and hackathons, been on advisory councils, and continue to work with the organization whenever I can!