London, Ontario
Hi, I'm Waqar.
I'm a software engineer at CARFAX, and a nerd about it on my own time too. My favourite projects start where programming meets something else I love: travel gave me Holiday Optimizer, and chess gave me BeaconChess and Spot the Checkmate. Each one is also how I'm learning AI, since that's where our field is heading. I build them for myself first; if they help someone else too, even better.
A few of them:
- Holiday Optimizer 2024Plans your time off around public holidays and weekends. Travel + Leisure, The Washington Post and Real Simple wrote about it.
- BeaconChess 2026A chess coach that explains every move in plain English.
- Spot the Checkmate 2026A YouTube channel that makes and posts its own chess puzzles, four a day.
- This site 2024Astro on S3 and CloudFront, a Lambda that counts the visits, Terraform for the rest.
Where I've worked:
- Software Engineer, CARFAX 2024 – now
- Associate Software Engineer, CARFAX 2022 – 2024
- Game Analyst Intern, Big Blue Bubble 2019 – 2020
Write to me about anything: something you've built, an idea, one of my projects, or just to say hi. Or about working together, if something I've built caught your eye.
waqarbinkalim[at]gmail[dot]com
GitHubLinkedInX
Talk soon,
Waqar
P.S. I've been keeping postcards from places I've been.