Howard Chen

Software Engineer II ·

edtoaster howchen vancouver

Work

  • 2025 – Present
    Instacart
    Software Engineer
  • 2024
    Meta
    Production Engineer II
  • 2021 – 2024
    Amazon Web Services EC2 Auto Scaling
    Software Engineer II
    Released Custom Termination Policies — Announcement, Docs
    Released Instance Maintenance Policies — AWS Blog, Docs
  • Summer 2020
    Amazon Web Services EC2 Auto Scaling
    Junior Software Engineer
    Developed Custom Termination Policies
  • Summer 2019
    Amazon Web Services Forecasting Platform
    Junior Software Engineer
    Designed customer debugging tools

Education

BSc in Computer Science with High Distinction
Dean's List Scholar
University of Toronto
Graduated 2021

Projects

  • hive
    RustAIMCP
    Stateless CLI and MCP server that orchestrates a swarm of Claude Code agents for autonomous software development. Features a coordinator → lead → worker hierarchy, per-agent git worktree isolation, automated code review via merge queue, and a live TUI dashboard.
    Source
  • ferret
    RustSearch
    Trigram-indexed code search engine inspired by Google Code Search. Supports boolean and regex queries across 60+ languages with incremental indexing, memory-mapped reads, and a web UI with search-as-you-type.
    Source
  • LittleLogistics & LittleContraptions
    JavaMinecraft31 million+ downloads
    A pair of Minecraft Forge mods adding water and rail logistics via tugs, barges, and automated routes — plus a Create mod expansion for contraption transport on barges. 18M downloads on LittleLogistics and 13M on LittleContraptions, with 11+ releases shipped.
    LittleLogistics LittleContraptions
  • ToastCPU
    RustVerilogHardware
    A complete 16-bit computing stack built from scratch: ISA and ABI specification, functional emulator, subscalar FPGA implementation in Verilog, and a custom assembler. Spans the full journey from architecture design to hardware synthesis.
    Source