# Derek Tam

> Software Engineer at Workday

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/derektam

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer II @ Workday
Jan 2023 – Present

### Reserve Logistics Officer @ United States Marine Corps
Jan 2019 – Present | United States

### Software Engineer @ Sveste
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023
• Constructed frontend through Svelte to eliminate the overhead of using a virtual DOM, promoting faster page rendering, and minimizing starter boilerplate.
• Safeguarded against weakly-typed static errors by incorporating Typescript interfaces into the codebase which improved documentation, decreased extensive runtime testing errors, and enabled safer refactoring for future growth.
• Built the application with Vite to enable rapid server startup, reduce latency, and permit hot module reloading to provide a more efficient production workflow.
• Created and integrated a NoSQL database to store the user input data and allow for efficient horizontal data scaling for accommodating increased user growth.
• Incorporated authentication and authorization measures with BCrypt hashing in the login to protect sensitive client data from being unsecured.
• Tested with Vitest to ensure tests created by the app ran successfully against the Svelte frontend framework.
• Hosted the application live through AWS, DynamoDB, and Github Actions to reduce costs while guaranteeing robust uptime availability. 
• Product developed under tech accelerator OS Labs (opensourcelabs.io)

### Keebuilds | Custom keyboard builder website @ Open Source
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022
• Utilized React Router to enable for seamless user web page navigation and re-rendering with minimal network requests to the server, overall trading off increased upfront loading costs for reduced re-rendering latency.
• Incorporated Redux Toolkit for more organized state management across multiple component redirects during the keyboard building process, improving production debugging and unit testing. 
• Designed and implemented a PostgreSQL database to store and query ACID-compliant keyboard build data tied to their login.

### Events on the Go  |  Event finder application @ Open Source
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022
• Fetched realtime EventBrite API data utilizing Axios to find the most popular events by location and user query i.e. sports, venue, artist.
• Built in Google OAuth through Passport.js to enable streamlined authentication and stronger user security.
• Hosted a server on Express for handling HTTP requests to multiple endpoints based on the middleware design pattern, promoting organized routing, readability, and maintenance.

### Let's Play Jeopardy  |  Play any Jeopardy! Game @ Open Source
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022
• Fetched data from the Jeopardy API with Axios to allow users to play any previously aired Jeopardy game from the show.
• Developed a single-page application utilizing React and React Hooks that created a dynamically stateful board of unique question containers which promoted efficient component re-rendering.
• Utilized HTML, CSS, and Material UI to design a simple, but responsive board display through maintainable and modular React components.

### Research Application Developer @ UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Dr. Peter Wang Laboratory
• Used Java to automate Fluocell, an open-source imaging software for cancer cells, by adding in execution scripts to analyze large datasets of images in a single function thus reducing the required amount of user input, and improving execution speed of the software runtime by 35%.
• Reconfigured cell tracking, border tracing, and gradient filtering formulas in MATLAB to improve accuracy by 26%.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science - BS in Bioengineering: Bioinformatics
UC San Diego
Jan 2015 – Jan 2019

### High School Diploma
South Pasadena High School
Jan 2011 – Jan 2015


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/derektam1997

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Source: https://flows.cv/derektam
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/derektam/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22