My bio
I'm an independent software engineer applying compiler technology to the data space.
I work on Trustfall, an engine that allows querying any datasource: APIs, files, databases, LLMs, or any combination of them. Check it out in your browser: this link will let you run the HackerNews query "Which GitHub or Twitter users are commenting on stories about OpenAI?"
I'm also the author of cargo-semver-checks, a linter for semantic versioning of Rust libraries.
Previously, I was a principal engineer at Kensho, working on query technology and developer productivity tools. I've also held architecture, management, and tech lead individual contributor roles, as well as stewarding Kensho's new grad and early-career recruiting strategy.
I firmly believe that early-career people are generally undervalued across our industry. I believe it's possible to do much better than the current "industry standard" hiring practices, and that doing so results in both more effective and more diverse teams.
I've written about hiring on my blog. While at Kensho, the team I assembled built and deployed cross-database query technology. I am as proud of the work we did as I am of the team we did it with: we had top diversity numbers, and almost everyone on the team had 2 or fewer years of industry experience.
One of the folks who joined my team first as an intern and then as a full-time engineer wrote a blog post about his experience having me as his mentor.
I've presented my work at many conferences and meetups. You can find the full list on the Talks page.
I enjoy skiing, both playing and watching ice hockey, and good sci-fi books and TV shows such as the Expanse series.
Selected awards
- two bronze medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (2009, 2011)
- two bronze medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (2010, 2011)
- 7th place at the CSAW Security Capture-The-Flag 2014 finals as part of MIT's team
- gold and silver medals at the Balkan Student Mathematical Competition (2009, 2008)
- two gold medals at the InfoMatrix international programming competition (2008, 2009)
- gold and bronze medals at the Junior Balkan Mathematical Olympiad (2008, 2007)
As an intern at Dropbox during the summer of 2013, I also won a runner-up "Beast Mode" (best of show) Hack Week award for building a pool shot coach system. The system offered shot advice by tracking the balls and cue stick positions using machine vision and an overhead camera.
College
I earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2015. At MIT, I did performance engineering and computer security research:
- An idea I had in my senior year's Advanced Performance Engineering class (6.886) evolved into a research paper that achieved 9-13x faster graph processing performance than the prior state-of-the-art.
- My team's Computer Systems Security (6.858) final project discovered vulnerabilities in six popular "PC remote control" applications with 2–7.5 million downloads in the Google Play Store alone.
- My team's Network and Computer Security (6.857) final project discovered a way to work around Android's camera use indicator policies and use the device's camera to capture pictures or video without any user-noticeable indication.
- As part of the Creating Video Games (CMS.611) course in 2012, a friend and I built three iterations of a built-from-scratch physics engine for our two-player co-op 2D platformer game Psychobunnies. The final iteration of the engine used a parametric method to solve the intersection-of-parabolas problem, enabling 120FPS+ gameplay even on weak single-threaded hardware. Our final presentation video is on YouTube.
During the summers between college semesters, I did software engineering internships at Palantir, Dropbox, and Firebase (shortly before the Google acquisition). I am deeply grateful to the kind folks at those companies that mentored me and helped me get to where I am today.