Team Spotlight: Introducing Ruben

Every week we ask a Terra team member to let us know who they are. Here's Ruben:

What wearables do you use?

I use the Apple Watch series 5.

What do you use it for?

I can connect it to my phone, get texts, things like that. And I make IOS apps, and it's nice to be able to test them on my watch.

What sort of apps do you make?

So I made a news app called Headlines Today and it's on the app store. I also made a little widget that I installed to my watch that I can use to check the news. Those are the ones on the App Store; I also made a few test apps including a social network for my school that had a watch widget too.

Oh cool, what was the social network about?

Well it was for my secondary school, I managed to get about 60 people from my year to sign up to it. It was tailored to the school experience so it had features like letting you share homework with other students, you could use it to send assignments to people. But it was unofficial, not on the app store.

What other stuff do you get up to?

I like Star Wars, a lot. I've read the books, watched the movies and I'm really excited about the new Obi Wan TV series coming soon. Outside of that, I've been working on a security camera and my friend and I are designing a 3D printed case for it right now. At the moment it's just a basic structure and isn't very well protected from poor weather conditions, so that's what we're working on.

What inspired you to design a security camera?

Well I got a Raspberry Pi - a small computer the size of a credit card, and thought what can I do with this? I'll make a security camera. At night, people would come up to the door and ring the doorbell, and of course we wouldn't want to answer it at 2:00am if we didn't know who it was. So the perfect solution would be a security camera.

When is the security camera complete?

It's completely functional now, if someone rings the doorbell I can have a conversation with them as it has a microphone and speaker. It also has facial recognition.

How long did it take you to make it?

The first design took five weeks but I keep adding new features.

Awesome. Somebody in the team mentioned you like tea...

I sure do. It started at the beginning of lockdown, before that I had no time for tea. There was more time to appreciate tea during lockdown. I thought it was really nice, and so I went on to try some green tea. I feel like once you start to enjoy it you really get into it and can try so many different types and brands.

What would be your favourite?

It's called Keemun, from Fortnam & Mason. It's a black tea from China. I also really like Darjeeling tea from India, but Keemun is top of the lot.

And you cycle to the office every day?

Yep, from Chiswick in around 45 mins. A nice cycle ride and I get to go through Hyde Park and Holland Park.

And how is balancing working and studying?

So far it's been okay, when I joined Terra it was my last week of term then I went on study leave, definitely great timing. First year CS is not too much work, it's not been too overwhelming and I have been able to dedicate a lot of time to Terra.

What next?

I would quite like to get a Masters in machine learning and AI. I hope Terra keeps me around too!

Have you been in London your whole life?

Yep, the whole time. I really like London. For a couple months I lived in Canada with my grandparents, and it was much more quiet.

Do you speak many languages?

Programming languages? Yes. C++, C, Swift, Python, PHP, Java, Java Script, learnt Kotlin recently and also SQL. Outside of that? English.

What's the next project in the mix?

I do like investing, I was thinking of making a news app with more investment focussed news and charts. The way my news app currently works is using a machine learning algorithm to summarise the news. So I would take that system and change the content to investment news.

But currently the news app runs on two little credit card sized computers in my room... So I'll probably need to upgrade this and do a lot of maintenance to get them properly working. I recently hit over 500 users, so if it continues to grow any more then I'll have to be sure I can sustain the growth.