Work

I'm a software engineer at Convex. We're making a serverless backend abstraction for web developers that focuses on your data. Easy subscription interface. Reactive queries. No backend management. We empower the frontend and product engineer to get more done on their own without needing to pull in server and data management expertise. We have to handle a lot of database challenges to make this seamless for the frontend engineer. For example, we run javascript queries deterministically in a v8 runtime embedded into our rust backend, tracking readsets in order to intersect with subsequent mutations to awaken and update reactively.

It's been a ton of fun working up and down the stack with a great crew of humans trying to rethink and replace the need for backend engineers at most companies. I really do believe that the set of arcane skills required to manage data models, databases, and backend services won't be required at most companies. I've been there since Nov, 2021 and it really has been awesome. Shoot me a line if this sounds interesting. We're hiring.

I maintain mypy-protobuf

I worked for 8 years at Dropbox (2013-2021) as a software engineer on just about everything. I'm proud of my work developing a new desktop client sync engine, improving developer environment, continuous integration, and repository structure. I helped extend a team between SF and Seattle, and kicked off a new team as the technical lead, where I'm especially proud of how we worked through the COVID year transition. Left in April 2021 and have nothing but appreciation for my time there. Met a lot of lifelong friends along the way. I like to think I've become a great engineer, leader, and the kind of friend/human others want on their team, acknowledging of course that all three of those things are lifelong journeys. Before that, I interned at Talaria (startup making a PHP JIT compiler that sold to Google), Microsoft (on anti-malware), and MIT Lincoln Labs (working in weather sensing group).

About Me

I live in San Francisco. I grew up in the Boston area. I got my BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (2008 - 2013). I moved to San Francisco in 2013 for work and have enjoyed it ever since. I've lived in short stints in a few other places (Berkeley 3-mo, Seattle, 3-mo, London 6-mo). I enjoy

Spending time with my pupper Pepper
bowling (I go once a week. Trying to raise my average)
finding excellent ramen (Mensho in SF, Tsujita in Santa Monica, and Taishoken in San Mateo are some faves in the US)
Tea - hot tea and bubble tea. I like tea flavors (Oolong, black tea, hong kong style, and sometimes jasmine). Make it myself at home.
SSBM - best game ever made. Now with rollback netcode
Trying out craft beers from local breweries. I have many faves in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Bend, Seattle, and beyond.
Ultimate Frisbee (recreationally). I used to play competitively in college (Mr Yuk), and have gotten back into it recreationally.
chess.com puzzle battle
Ice Cream. My favorite ice cream place is Bedford Farms. If you disagree, you're entitled to your opinion, and also that opinion is wrong.
Reading and writing code - I really enjoy it. Especially refactoring.
Stacking diffs. The fact that community/community#4477 is not solved on github is a travesty.

Open Source Projects

I've been trying to make contributions (small or large) to a variety of open source projects. I've learned how things are done in many projects, made in impact in many places, and it's been fun and satisfying.

I maintain / am core contributor to:

mypy-protobuf - Generate mypy stub files for protobufs
pb-jelly - Proto code generation framework for rust
pytest-flakefinder
git_repo_merges

I've contributed (small or big) to: