Looking For…

I’m a pragmatic, classically trained software engineer with a flair for design looking to put myself to work creating meaningful software that people love to use.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Bachelor of Science in Engineering – May 2008
Major: Computer Science
Minor: Mathematics, Business
Certificate in Technology Entrepreneurship

Knowledge

Programming Languages

Swift = Obj-C = C > Javascript > Java = Kotlin > Python = Ruby > SmallTalk > Perl > OCaml > C++

Disciplines

Native Mobile, Web, UI, A11y, GraphQL, Application programming, Systems programming, Framework design

Experience

Twitter Inc. (2012-2022)

I joined the small Mobile Web team with responsibility for our rich (Javascript+HTML5) mobile web client. Later, as the company grew and its needs changed, in 2014, I came out of retirement from MacOS development to join the iOS team.

In that time I’ve had the good fortune to work on most aspects of what I’d call application engineering: across feature surface areas (onboarding, search, and others), up-and-down the stack (from user-facing to internal frameworks), both sides of the client–server model, and from feature launch to feature sunset.

Lately, I’ve been a member of the Client Infrastructure team, which is responsible for the core components used by throughout the application. A brief summary:

• 2021: iOS engineer on the Client Infrastructure team, building and maintaining shared components used across the platform.

  • Identifying, formalizing, and designing best practice patterns for feature development.
  • Migrating to GraphQL. Inclusive of tooling (code generation), adoption (shepherding/evangelization), and verification (A/B tests).
  • Revising API error handling across clients (Android, iOS, Web) to be simple, consistent, and rigorous.

• 2020: iOS engineer working on the Explore (content discovery) team, working on features and many of platform-wide infrastructural initiatives.

  • Laid the foundations for and then grew, maintained, and shepherded adoption of the common iOS client infrastructure that now drives all timelines in the application (Unified Rich Timelines).
  • Led charge to address poor build performance and intermodule dependencies (big Swift↔ObjC interroperability story).
  • Regularly chasing down inconsistencies and building compontents around common patterns (w/ occassional forays into Android).

• …

• 2014: Comes out of retirement from Cocoa programming to join the onboarding team working on the iOS client.

  • Balanced rigor with rapid iteration and experimentation.
  • Brought stability to what was a frequent cause of serious incidents: bugs in our sign up process. By implementing comprehensive testing (from unit to UI tests) and radically simplifying the implementation we were able to stop fighting fires and, instead, iterate and improve the process with confidence.

• 2012: Starts on Mobile Web as 1 of 2 engineers for engineers specializing in the Javascript-rich HTML5 mobile web client for Twitter.

  • Worked alongside iOS and Android counterparts to prototype and deliver uniform features on all platforms.
  • Developed, deployed, and maintained services for millions of users and thousands of requests per second.

I’ve also been proud to have worked on not-strictl-engineering initiatives within the organization. Hightlights:

• Driving reform of “+2” (code review approval privilege) program within product engineering. Applied Joan C. Williams’s bias interrupter framework to make distribution of priviledge to be more responsive, accessible, and equitable.
• Founding member (ringleader being @naz_erkan) of the small Machine Learning Fairness reading group that would grow into the Responsible ML Working Group.
• Reviewed and recommended proposals from research community for the Conversational Health RFP.

Yammer Inc. (2010-2012)

Company sought to build a “internal Facebook for companies”. As an engineer on the Platform team, later reorganized into the Web team, I worked on both the backend and client, but had a focus on advanced JavaScript features/frameworks.

• Security: sandboxing JS+HTML+CSS, finding/fixing XSS vulnerabilities, sanitization of HTML+CSS, salts, signatures, etc.
• Implementation of Yammer’s OpenGraph API (full-stack) – a public API analogous to Facebook’s 2010-era APIs.
• Server-side JS in support of 3rd party hosted applications.
• Major contributions to etherpad-lite for collaborative text editing
• Resident Git expert.

Slide Inc. (2008-2010)

If you remember Facebook apps, this was one of the companies working in that space. In time, it pivoted to social gaming and virtual goods.

• Engineering Lead for Social Star, a social role playing game. Took responsibility for bringing externally developed application up to shippable standards by release date.

• Engineer for our next-generation game engine. Project was an exercise in rapid development: it was built (in collaboration with a sister application) from scratch and shipped in 3 months, then heavily iterated on thereafter.
  • Built and maintained reusable components shared between several (3) applications.
  • Implemented features all the way through the stack.
  • Demonstrated ability to use patterns judiciously and to refactor pragmatically.