Anton Garay
Welcome
Hey there, welcome to my site! Thanks for stopping by :)
In case you missed the massive title on the page before, I'm Anton Garay. I'm finishing my Computer Science honours at the University of Auckland, and next year I'm moving to Sydney to be a Software Engineer at Atlassian.
Please have a look around. There are a lot of features to explore here, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them.
About me
I grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and if you're wondering how and why I got into computer science it was because I liked playing video games. That was basically it.
These days I like nerding out over how systems work and interact with each other, then pretending I'll turn it into a side project. Currently I'm mainly building stuff for myself, and stuff that makes people a bit happier. You can see some of it on my projects page!
Honours is taking up most of my time right now, so my hobbies have been narrowed down to the gym and running. The dream is a 140kg bench (I'm at 112.5kg) and a sub 25 minute 5km. Outside of that I bake, and I eat out more than I probably should 😋
If I ever get my time back, I'd like to:
- play my like infinite backlog of games
- learn to draw, or at least learn pixel art
- code up a game
- pick up music production
I've been an avid "gamer" (kinda cringe to say) my whole life. My favourites are Minecraft, any multiplayer game with friends, and the Phoenix Wright / Great Ace Attorney games. I used to play a bunch of competitive titles too: Valorant, Dead by Daylight, Apex, League, Fortnite, you name it. I probably have over 15k hours in those titles alone (if only I'd spent that time doing something productive).
Those games were really consuming. They took up way too much of my life, and honestly it wasn't that healthy. Between work and uni I don't have that kind of time anymore, and I realised the ROI wasn't there. It mostly just stressed me out, and I was never that good for how much "work" I put in anyway. So lately I've been enjoying roguelites and more single-player games, like Hollow Knight, Silksong and of course Risk of Rain 2. Check out my games list, or if you're interested in what I've been playing, my Steam profile!
The one competitive thing I've hung on to is aim training. I have 1,000 hours in KovaaK's and I'm one score away from Voltaic Grandmaster, which is probably the last competitive thing I'll achieve before I start full-time work.
This is Ruffy, my dog. I've had him since I was 11, and he's been a huge part of my life. He's just a cool guy, and I hope all of my friends get to meet him one day.
I also have a fan club (just my friends), masquerading as AGroupForCoders, or AGFC. I didn't name it, I promise I'm not that self-centred. I'm more the group's punching bag (EVERYONE just bullies me).
We've been through a lot together, from a secret operation and hackathons to somewhat running a club and job grinding. I owe a lot to my friends, and I wouldn't be here without them.
So when I tried writing a proper bio, I had them proofread it:
Anton is a disciplined honours student with a GPA of 9/9, which Eric corrected to 6/9 (it was a 4 in first year). He benches 140kg, which Jos corrected to 112.5kg and is fully, which Kimberley corrected to NOT committed to the cut. He eats out once in a while, which Jerry corrected to every other day, always parks right outside, which Joohui corrected to like 1km away from wherever he's going, and loves building things, which Koutaro corrected to wiring things up. He always, which Jos corrected to rarely finishes his side projects, has a huge music taste, which Joohui corrected to one playlist he ever shares, and has a very extensive, which Friend corrected to smol vocabulary.
Experience
If you're curious, here are some of the things I've had the pleasure of doing, from internships to tutoring to helping run a club at uni. Hover over or select one to see a bit more about it:
Tutored CS399, helping teams with their projects through mentoring and sharing my own experiences.
Spent the summer basically doing game dev, helping architect and implement grouping in Confluence Whiteboards. I broke prod three times, so there's probably a sign in the office now warning new interns about me.
Taking care of the club's finances. The new gaming PC and camera gear were club expenses, I promise.
Mentored a team while overseeing deployments of 16 projects, and built a CMS for our website.
My first time ever coding in TypeScript, and I made a backend CMS from scratch for Youth of Orakei.
Spent the summer working on internal tooling.
Details about the site
I've always wanted to make a portfolio website, but every previous attempt I either lost motivation or was just unhappy with how unoriginal or borrowed the look was (I wanted to be quirky lol). This led me to giving up and claiming to "not have enough time". However, after playing a few games cough cough I was inspired to make a portfolio designed like a video game UI, as I felt that represented me pretty well and would make the site feel like me.
To make it stand out, I took a page from my time at Atlassian, where I worked on Confluence Whiteboards (the best team ever btw), and used some tech you don't usually find on portfolio sites. The libraries are different from the ones over there, but this site uses state machines for keyboard navigation and for the dialogue throughout the site, Durable Objects as a "multiplayer lobby" that visitors connect to, and Yjs to pack up and apply the updates that get passed around that multiplayer lobby and this lets us see other users on the website and allows for chat.
I'm only using the "awareness" part of Yjs, which honestly isn't needed for this, since you could hand-roll the encoding and state changes yourself. I used it anyway because 1. I used it at my internship and 2. I'm planning to add an interactive collab whiteboard or some games later, so this is a note to my future self: please update the website.
I was gonna use an ECS but I don't have any games right now either.
For the question why did I want to make a website? It was for a few reasons some being:
- I wanted to create a website to showcase my personality and my interests such as photography and recipes (gallery and recipes coming soon).
- I wanted to try recreating stuff i learnt at my internship
Fomo- I'm a "developer" so I felt like it was appropriate to finally make one while i still have time.
So yeah thats about it.
Also massive shoutout to Eric Zheng and Andrew Qiu for being the first people I knew to make a cool portfolio, which I've taken heavy inspiration from. Please check them out, and of course check out all of my other friends!
Where to visit next?
That's pretty much me! If you're not sure where to go from here:
The things I've made, this site included.
Everyone who talks on this site, including the friends who roasted my bio.
See how many you've found so far.
Change the theme, rebind the controls, or turn on collaboration to see who else is here.
Contact
If you wanna say hi, talk about something on here, or just stalk what I'm up to, here's where you can find me.