..

whoami

May 2024

For those looking for a deeper history of me (in somewhat chronological order)

• I grew up in New York solving Rubik’s cubes, modding Nerf Guns, building fantasy swords, and playing video games.
• In the summer before university, I took my dads advice on what to study and signed up for the Computer Engineering major at UC Santa Cruz. I spent the rest of that summer running cables through data center floors in Hollywood.
• One week into University, I didn’t know the difference between Computer Science and Computer Engineering, so I switched my major to CS because I made more friends in those classes. This was a fateful decision.
• I really enjoyed academic Computer Science. I especially loved my systems classes. Operating Systems, Databases, Advanced Programming, and Computer Security were my favorites.
• During the school year, I had the privilege to work at the Learning & Experimental Economics Projects Lab. I got to work on a team and had my first encounter with serious software. We ran experiments on high-frequency trading markets.
• One summer, I interned at Daystrom Technology Group. They took a huge chance on a young guy who didn’t know anything. I am forever thankful that they did. I wrote software that benchmarked their filesystems.
• Another summer I interned at NBCUniversal, where I wrote security applications like nmap port probers. I made some good friends there.
• My love for running servers started in my dorm room, continued on into my college apartments, and remains today. This obsession started when my dad said I should check out Ubuntu.
• My senior year I ran the software team for Rocket Club in its inaugural year at UCSC. I worked on integrating computer systems into the rocket sled, programming computer vision for object detection, and developing an automatic braking system.
• I graduated in 2018 and landed a job at Amazon on the Alexa Mobile team. I learned to build high-throughput, high resilience, low latency distributed systems on AWS. I also got to work on the forward deployment of a recommendation system, and the accompanying ML pipeline.
• The rest of my time at Amazon was spent honing my skills at Amazon F3’s grocery delivery.
• I enjoyed writing fun websites during this time. ColorSplash was my favorite and inspired by my girlfriend.
• In 2021, I joined the DFINITY Foundation’s San Francisco office to work on the Internet Computer Protocol. I loved its startup culture. I spent most of my time on the Network Nervous System team maintaining one of the most complex DAOs in the Web3 ecosystem.
• While there, I also got to start the Service Nervous System from scratch, which was an incredibly rewarding experience.
• In the winter of 2023, I was inspired to return to some of my roots when watching Adam Savage, Stuff Made Here, Casey Neistat, and Scott Yu-Jan. I converted my third bedroom to a home lab and bought a 3D printer. I’m trying to learn how to manufacture things. I mod Nerf Guns again, build overpowered potato cannons, and do lots of fun electronic projects.
• I still write fun software, like RAG bots for SNS knowledge and Old School Runescape arbitrage programs.
• Recently, I’ve been benchmarking my 3D printer.