About me

My name is Winson Chung, though I have been known to answer to Winston, Wilson, and even Wilston on occasion. I am proudly Canadian, a software engineer, problem solver, habitual sketcher, and unfortunately also poorly bilingual (still working on that).

I currently work at Google on the Android team responsible for the user experience of the core System UI and platform. Prior to joining Google, I worked at a Toronto-based startup called Bumptop with a small group of clever people on a product designed to create a more natural and intuitive desktop experience. In particular, I led the development of the underlying architecture and implemented various user-facing features including Themes, Web tiles, Facebook/Twitter integration, Sticky notes and Picture frames, and internationalization. BumpTop was later acquired by Google in May 2010.

I am a graduate of the Computer Science program at the University of Toronto, and have a strong interest in Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Graphics, and more broadly, Psychology and Design. During my undergrad, I spent my Professional Experience Year as a Co-op student at Autodesk Toronto (formerly Alias Systems) working on Maya 8.0/8.5 (a comprehensive 3D computer modeling and animation package) implementing new UIs and APIs for manipulating 3D content. Following the final year of university, I spent nine months as an intern at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California working on the next-gen internal animation and rigging software that would be used for future films.

Hopefully, all this experience will one day be useful in making the world a better place. If you want to reach out, you can do so using the links on the side bar.

Past projects

	RegexOne is a website that introduces and teaches users regular expressions. Unlike other methods of teaching regular expressions, users are able to experiment with the syntax in real-time, on a variety of practical, real world examples. Initial feedback suggests that for experimental and visual learners, this method provides a deeper learning experience than from strictly reading about regular expressions.
	SQLBolt is a website that introduces and teaches users SQL. Like RegexOne, SQLBolt is an in-browser, interactive tutorial which allows users to learn and experience various SQL concepts with a database of popular Pixar movies.
	VimConfig is a website that exposes a better interface for configuring Vim. Without having to dig through the complex and sometimes confusing help documentation, beginner Vim users can use modern UI widgets to configure their Vim editor quickly and easily. The project also served as an experiment in Backbone.js client-side development.
	The launch of BumpTop 1.0 for Windows. Highlights include numerous features from Anand's original masters thesis, as well as slideshows, sharing via Facebook and Twitter and much more. A video of the subsequent launch of BumpTop 2.0 with multitouch support and much more can also be found here.
	Unnatural Habitat was the name of an animated short that I worked on for CSC 418 (Computer Graphics) with Ryan Chan about a man's quest to find and document the mysterious wooden monkey. Over the span of three weeks, we wrote the animation & rudimentary rigging framework (in OpenGL) and completed the script and animation for the entire short. Surprisingly, we ended up winning the actual Wooden Monkey award for our animation that term. This and other submissions from that class can be found here.
	For CSC 428 (Human Computer Interaction), I decided to write an overview of the current state of development of Zoomable User Interfaces today. It is a look into an interesting problem space that I think still has numerous possibilities for exploration and research.
	Start with Soup was a website that Rhys Causey and I wrote in 2007 to help people to find reviews for restaurants in Toronto more intuitively using maps and filters. The site (both front and back end) was completed and launched over winter break and was quickly adopted by visitors. It is currently no longer in development.