Joseph Lee

Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo.


Bio

I'm a Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo. I want to build honest software that helps people, and I'm drawn to full-stack development, automation, and systems with real users. Lately I've been most curious about computer vision and AI/ML, and I hope to pursue research down the line.

Outside academics I stay active through climbing, volleyball, reading, and cooking. Learn more about me below.


Work Experience

Software QA AnalystEnvironment and Climate Change Canada

Sept. 2025 – Dec. 2025 · North York, Canada

  • Designed and maintained end-to-end (E2E) regression suites in Python, Robot Framework, TypeScript, and Playwright, cutting manual test cycles by 60% and surfacing 20+ defects ahead of release.
  • Owned cross-environment functional, integration, and usability test plans, validating new features and defect fixes through UAT sign-off.
  • Drove defect triage in Azure DevOps by sharpening reproduction steps and consolidating duplicates, lowering duplicate report rate by 40%.

IT Technician and Support AnalystEnvironment and Climate Change Canada

May 2025 – Dec. 2025 · North York, Canada

  • Delivered Tier 1 and Tier 2 support for 200+ end users, cutting average resolution time by 50% by writing reusable diagnostic playbooks.
  • Built PowerShell and Python automations for account provisioning and software deployment, reducing onboarding effort by 35%.
  • Deployed and hardened Windows workstations at scale with Microsoft Autopilot, Intune, and Entra ID, standardizing setup across the team.

ServiceNow Software DeveloperServiceNow Developer Program

Jan. 2025 – Aug. 2025 · North York, Canada

  • Shipped Client Scripts and UI Policies that automated multi-step approval workflows, removing repetitive manual steps for end users and tightening process consistency.
  • Used the GlideForm and GlideUser APIs to add dynamic validation and role-based UI behavior, improving data quality at intake.

Projects

H[AI]r Swift, SwiftUI, iOS in progress · private

A native iPhone app I'm currently building in SwiftUI. Focused on a clean, responsive user experience; more details coming as the project matures.

Chess Engine C++

Built an object-oriented chess engine in C++ as my CS246 final project, implementing full rule enforcement — castling, en passant, promotion, and check/checkmate detection — alongside a tunable AI opponent powered by minimax with alpha-beta pruning. GitHub

Quote Finder Python, Flask, React, TensorFlow

Full-stack app that surfaces relevant quotes and verses from natural-language prompts using sentence-transformer embeddings and cosine similarity, served through a Flask REST API and consumed by a React front-end. Reached 85% relevance accuracy on a held-out evaluation set. GitHub

Image Lab Python, Tkinter, Flask, OpenCV, Docker

Desktop image-processing app exposing 10+ OpenCV transformations through a Tkinter GUI, backed by a containerized Flask REST API and verified with Postman. Profiled and rewrote the processing pipeline to bring end-to-end runtime from 2.5s down to under 1s, and integrated Real-ESRGAN to clean up low-quality uploads. GitHub

Magestic Brawl Python, Pygame-CE Gymnasium currently adding new features and reinforcement learning

A 2-d streetfighter game that uses magestic characters. Written in Python and I try to improve it whenever I have the time. GitHub

ML Notes Markdown, Python (Pandas, Tensorflow, Numpy, PyTorch)

An evolving ML/AI learning sandbox with study notes, notebook experiments, and chapter-by-chapter work from hands-on machine learning resources. GitHub

Notes Markdown

An open, growing collection of notes spanning coursework, papers, tools, and ideas I want to keep close at hand. Public so others can read along or borrow from it. GitHub

ECCC Scripts Python

During my co-op at Environment and Climate Change Canada, I made a few scripts to help boost my productivity at work. I changed the scripts to be generic since I can't display any data that I used while working. GitHub

Self-Driving Race Car Python · PyTorch · Gymnasium

Rebuilding a deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to drive a race car from raw pixels. The agent uses DQN to navigate a procedurally generated track in the CarRacing-v3 environment, with the goal of scoring 900+ averaged over 100 races. A rewrite of an existing TF1 implementation, now in modern PyTorch. GitHub

Neural Ronin Python · Pygame · Gymnasium · Stable-Baselines3 in progress

A 2D samurai platformer built as a reinforcement learning training environment. The game is built from scratch using the pygpen engine, featuring sprite animations, physics, tilemap-based levels, and combat. A Gymnasium wrapper exposes the game as an RL environment, with a PPO agent trained via Stable-Baselines3 to learn to fight through levels from game state observations. GitHub


Reading

Papers and writing I've been working through. Nothing published of my own yet — I'm reading to follow what interests me and to get better at engaging with research.

Link You can view my annotations to these papers via this link.


Blog

Writing occasionally. Nothing published yet — check back.


Misc