About Me

Hello! My name is Parsa Tajik. Growing up, I never quite fit into a specific group. I was definitely nerdy and good with numbers but I also enjoyed interacting with and learning more about people.

I got introduced to programming sometime around the age of 12. My school back home, Allame Helli 1, had a programming curriculum that started with QBasic and gradually moved up to C++.

I immigrated to Canada with my family in 2015. The first few years were definitely challenging. Getting used to a new country, a new language, and a completely new atmosphere in your teen years is not something that I’d necessarily recommend to everyone but it can really build your character.

In high school, I was obsessed with programming competitions and becoming a gold medalist in IOI, the International Olympiad in Informatics. When I came to Canada, I had to study algorithms and data structures on my own (solved over 800 problems just from this website) to participate in the Canadian Computing Competition and qualify for the country's international team. In 2016 and 2017, I was one of the top 100 students in Canada but unfortunately, I didn’t make the cutoff as they only selected the top 20 participants in the country.

Although it was hard, this experience was pivotal for my personal development. I made a lot of new friends who were also interested in weird computer stuff and we had our little group. Below is an old image of The Computer Club that I founded in my local high school (you can also see the teenage Parsa):

Fast forwarding a few years, I went to the University of Toronto and studied computer science! Since 2020, I have worked at a variety of companies (details on my LinkedIn) and by the time you’re reading this, I’m probably a software engineer at Affirm. On the side, I have been running Bloorsoft, my boutique development agency that helps founders with building their tech and raising funding.

On this website, I’ll be sharing my journey of building products in public, helping founders with their startups, and other things that I find interesting (this blog was heavily inspired by Paul Graham and his amazing essays). I hope that you enjoy my posts and get some value from the things that I share. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want to chat!

Godspeed,

Parsa

Sept, 2023

P.S. Since you made it this far, here’s a bonus pic of my little doggo, Babe.