The Only Limitation is One's Own Mind

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Portrait shot of Antonio smiling and standing outside in a Yellow shirt that says Telaport, the background is blurred.

Antonio La Placa, HBSc

Computer Scientist & Founder of Telaport

Computer's have been my passion my entire life. The computer is an extension of humanity's mind, and allows humanity, for the first time ever, to put thought into the physical world.


I began to take programming/computer science seriously in 2011 when I purchased my first text book to give me the foundations of everything I needed to learn about programming.


By 2013, I had consumed so many textbooks, that I went from learning BASIC to publishing Android APK's on the Googe Play Store in October 2013.


Also in October 2013, I had been chosen to begin an un-paid internship at my local Television Studio TV Cogeco (now Your TV), and began directing live tv shows extremely quickly as my talent in conducting team efforts and attention to detail was very much welcome in the television industry. I stayed with the television studio until my High-School graduation in 2017.

Antonio in Directors Seat in Television Studio

University

2017-2022

After Graduating High-School with Honours and an academic average of 96% (particularly excelling in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, and Communications Technologies), I began my career at the University of Toronto in August 2017.


Initially I had enrolled in the Computer Scientist Specialist program, I had a difficult time taking tests and studying for exam heavy Mathematical courses, in retrospect it was the best thing that could have happened for me, and molded me into developing more effective studying and learning methods than my peers. I then had to shift my focus, but still adiment on achieving my goal of an Honours Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, I began my HBSc in Computer Science & Geographical Information Systems, with a Communications, Culture, and Information Technologies Major that focused on Web-Dev and Game-Dev.


I found out something about myself that shocked even me. At first, I had thought that I would not enjoy anything to do with Statistics, having taken a Post-Graduate Level Statistics course in my second year as a Computer Science Specialist requirement. However, I quickly found out that in GIS, with my Computer Science background, I was able to use statistics to my advantage. I quickly was able to produce and interpret results in all of my Geographical Information Systems (Sattelite & Data Processing) courses allowing me to quickly become top of my class in all applied GIS courses, creating the best team projects in my class.

Antonio standing with his colleagues at Novanta.

Professional Life

2023-Present

Now today, after waiting out the pandemic, I finished my Honours Bachelor of Science in December 2022, have a great range of new skills from Computer Science, to Advanced Statistics, GIS, Web-Development, Game-Development, and some Computer Engineering all under my belt. I have built an entire database with a fully functioning CRUD Web App to streamline work flow and communication from manager to employees, communicating & resolving issues faster and streamline the building of job orders connected to cars and customers. I began my Software Engineer position at Novanta Inc. for their Summer Internship 2023 program and in that small time frame of 3 months, I created, and launched a data pipeline and visualization dashboard for the company to see insights using historic data that was previously not properly/consistently stored over the years.

After leading Novanta in Data Engineering, my internship finished in mid-August 2023, and led me to launch my current company TELAPORT Inc. in November 2023. In this company, we use the latest frameworks and technologies to revolutionize the face of e-commerce. TELAPORT does this through democratizing commerce, where instead of traditional ecommerce platforms who make money by taking away the value of the customer and sellers goods, we allow people to barter and trade for items they want, for one small fee that's the same for everybody and everything. We launch on March 28th, 2024. Learn More About TELAPORT Here.