About Me
Software engineering
I'm currently a full stack software engineer at Honor, helping to expand the world's capacity to care for older adults. I'm based in Austin, TX. I primarily work with python, React, and AWS infrastructure. Always learning.
I enjoy collaborative problem solving, writing code, and deploying products with direct impact, and I'm fortunate to work at a mission-driven company. Mostly though, I just love to work with and support a team of growth-oriented, smart, compassionate, and talented people.
Interests
With my free time, I like to keep a plant alive, read books, climb rocks, hike, and generally be in nature. I enjoy stand-up comedy and those rare ideas that add a whole new dimension to the way you see the world.
Here are some current interests that occur to me as I write this (April 2023), in no particular order.
- my personal power/responsibility as a citizen of the country with the highest per-capita emissions in the world, in a pivotal time to help lessen climate change
- improving kids' outcomes in education, and effective uses of technology towards that end
- writing, art, and personal identity in a world with powerful generative ML models
- mental health
- building/maintaining social connections in a remote-first, work-centric, individualistic culture
- the best tacos in Austin
- that gap between what people think they want and how they spend their time
- how to brew the perfect cup of coffee
- the subjects that we spend our attention on (consciously and unconsciously), and the benefits of mindfullness and meditation
- driving forces behind the latest rise in willfull ignorance, proud intolerance, and reactionary politics
- economic systems
- creating more personal space for creativity -- coding/hack projects, sketching, music, playing
- complex systems science
- natural science and beauty in our own backyards
- preserving biodiversity for future generations
- the Garbage Day substack and the future of the internet
Education
I was curious about the academic research world and about ML, so in 2018/2019 I went and got an MS in CS focused on ML. I was mainly interested in NLP (though gotta say I did not see this rapid breakaway success of large language models coming) and in building machine-in-the-loop systems to help people make better decisions.
That was basically the theme of my MS research: I looked into human preferences of task delegation to machines delegable to machines, what degree of automation people thought they wanted, and why, advised by the excellent Prof. Chenhao Tan. Our initial research was fairly preliminary, based on surveys at a single point in time, but I think it's going to be interesting to see how these preferences evolve and correspond with what actually is getting automated today. From an industry perspective, automation is the only feasible way to scale companies while maintaining quality and cost, so it's going to happen regardless. Which decisions "should" we keep people in control of? Who should decide?
Other areas I found really interesting but didn't get to explore as deeply as I'd have liked: network analysis, and biologically-inspired multi-agent systems, and explainable AI (XAI). CU had wonderful faculty and classes on the first two.
Prior to that, I earned my BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012, and worked for 5 years as an embedded software engineer at Qualcomm in Boulder, CO. There, I fell in love with the mountains and developed an ongoing appreciation for skiing, hiking, climbing, and fine craft beer.
Connect
I'd love to hear from you -- comments, projects, want to get a coffee, etc! Please feel free to reach out through email, github, or social media.