Ashlyn on the deck of a boat, with a city skyline across the water behind her

! I’m Ashlyn.

I study Engineering Science at the University of Toronto. Right now I’m building an LLM inference gateway in Go. It sits between apps and AI providers like Cohere, and handles routing, rate limiting, caching, and failover.

Before that, I worked on caching at Shopify, and trained neural networks at UTIAS to keep drones stable while they carry a swinging payload. My team’s autonomous robot also took 2nd place at UTRA Hacks 2026.

Outside of that, I play oboe and piano, a few video games, and go hiking out West.

Work

Recent work

What I’m building now, my internship at Shopify, research at UTIAS, and a few hackathons.

All projects on GitHub

LLM inference gatewayIn progress

A gateway in Go that sits between apps and AI providers like Cohere. It routes requests, rate-limits them, caches responses, and fails over when a provider goes down. I’m working on how it schedules requests and handles concurrency, to bring latency down and throughput up.

Go

A Shopify sales report filtered by product metafields, from Shopify’s product video Footage: Shopify

Shopify2026

On the Metafields team, I cut repeated callback work, moved two loaders onto one cache reader, and replaced 32 copies of capability logic with a GraphQL API.

~81%
of ~10.8B daily reads served by the cache
1,491
always-on machines’ worth of compute saved
−18%
callback invocations

Ruby · Memcached · GraphQL

Chalkboards covered in control theory derivations

UTIAS Flight Systems & Controls2025

Trained neural contraction metrics (neural CCMs) for stable trajectory tracking of drones carrying slung payloads, and extended them toward 360° roll maneuvers.

PyTorch · Neural networks · Control theory

A simulator-style 3D recreation of the team’s blue robot gripping a purple cube on a checkerboard floor

Vertically Inclined2026

UTRA Hacks 2026 · 2nd place overall · Best track course performance

An autonomous robot for a Winter Olympics–themed course, built with four teammates. It picks up a cube, drives either an obstacle course or a set of ramps, lines up on a target by colour and launches a ball, all from a modular C++ codebase on an Arduino.

C++ · Arduino · PlatformIO

PulseSafe app screens: a user overview, a map of nearby alerts and a responder application

PulseSafe2022

An app that watches heart rate from a Fitbit and alerts people nearby if something looks like an emergency. Built at Hack the 6ix.

React · Node.js · Fitbit API · Twilio

Flow Finder: a form for latitude, longitude and dates beside a map of East Asian waters

Flow Finder2022

A web app that predicts where lost items and oil spills drift at sea, using ocean-current data for East Asian waters. Built at Hack3.

Python · Flask · JavaScript