About Me
I'm a backend software engineer with a passion for simple, elegant, scalable solutions that radically simplify day-to-day tasks performed by everyone. I love designing systems built around explainable, auditable algorithms that take everyone's needs into account. I also love when I'm able to radically improve the performance of a system by making cross-cutting changes, or radically simplify a system by removing technical debt.
I'm concerned about the ways in which technology fails to treat all individuals in an equitable fashion, particularly when it comes to applications involving machine learning. To that end, I work to ensure that any project I'm involved with is designed in an ethical and equitable fashion. I'm not interested in technology that perpetuates systematic injustices, exploits or reinforces inequitable conditions, or which chooses to solve a business problem at the expense of individuals' well-being.
My strongest area of expertise is systems and backend software design, where I'm fluent at any level ranging from heavy-abstraction enterprise backends down to x86-64 assembly. Other topics I'd like to learn about include the low-level workings of digital media (audio/video compression, DSP, high-performance media storage) as well as programming language design and implementation.
All opinions here are mine, not my employer's.
Capabilities
I've done significant work in a wide variety of languages:
- C++ - my favored language for anything scalable
- C - used throughout undergraduate
- Java - currently my most-practiced language at my job
- Kotlin - currently learning on the side, finding very enjoyable
- Scala - learned in undergraduate
- Python - used for simple automations on my home computer that never need to scale beyond more than a handful of files
Other languages I've used briefly or find less favorable:
- LaTeX - used for undergraduate note-taking and assignment type-setting, but I've probably forgotten most of the finer points
- Rust - viewed some tutorials, meaning to revisit eventually
- Groovy - built some pipelines
- JavaScript & web stack - not for me
Credentials and Career
I'm currently working as a backend engineer at Google. I'm a small part of a very large team which maintains the storage and backend serving systems for Google user profile data and connections.
Before that, I did a summer internship at Travelport, where I worked on an internal systems team to enable continuous integration capabilities for a complex monolithic hybrid-language Linux application used widely by Travelport's systems.
In May 2020, I graduated summa cum laude from CU Boulder's College of Engineering with a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science, minoring in Applied Mathematics.