Welcome aboard, Jake Richard! During IPPD, you demonstrated exceptional skills, dedication, and a strong work ethic. You let you code speak for itself and treated it as a true craft. You're one of the few who revels in both the gory details and the big picture—a true engineer's engineer. We did what any sane company would do—found a way to bring you on board full-time.
The End…And a new beginning! The University of Florida has given me so much to be thankful for, but this last year is not far down on the list. I had the opportunity to work with an incredible group of engineers (Douglas Ta, Antonio Migotto, Jania Fernan, Mark Zhang) on an exciting, current capstone design project. In partnership with Vispero®—a leader in the accessibility software field—we developed a custom Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture that made it possible to converse with GPT about screen readers and the actions they support. With critical guidance from Catia Silva, we produced an application that will eventually serve real users. The application was already made available to a small set of employees who were very impressed with its potential to reduce the learning curve of screen reader usage. About half way through the year, our project’s liaison engineer, Sriram Ramanathan, extended an opportunity to work for Vispero® and TPGi as a contractor, which I gratefully accepted. Since then, I’ve been handling some exciting DevOps and general engineering tasks for both companies. Namely, I’ve led a DevOps initiative to improve the scalability and maintainability of tpgarc.com. Working in accessibility is a blast. You have the chance to create software that makes a real, positive impact on users’ lives and to solve problems that are unlike those you’d find anywhere else. Now, more than ever, the field is brimming with opportunities for innovation. I’ve found it to be immensely rewarding, which is why I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining Vispero® as a full time employee starting today. In this role, I’m hoping to leverage the power of modern AI to build more effective accessibility tooling. Thank you Sriram Ramanathan for your support through this process. Thank you Vispero® for giving me the opportunity to work in this exciting field. And most of all thank you University of Florida for giving me the mental flexibility and technical know-how that will ensure I excel in this role. Hope to share more about this new chapter very soon!
Chase Aucoin
1mo
Congrats!
Software Engineer @ Vispero | Specializing in AI Accessibility Tools
2moI’m just happy to have found a company with such a keen interest in innovating. I can’t wait to push that needle and build some great software here!