About Me
Table of Contents
I grew up in Canada, moved to San Francisco in 2009, and spent some years in New York. I don’t identify with any particular nation state or city, but these days you’ll usually find me in the North Eastern part of North America. This page contains a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve done or worked on.
These days I’m primarily interested in working with early-stage startups. In particular, I like businesses that create real value, aren’t fraudulent/scammy/hype-based, generate cash flow, and aren’t necessarily dependent on cheap debt.
As a Professional #
I’ve worked at a number of different startups including Airbnb, Mesosphere (now known as D2IQ), Braze, and others.
My first startup was a Canadian oil and gas company that manufactured instrumentation for oil and gas exploration. Specifically, we created tools for measuring pressure, temperature, and other metrics within oil and gas wells. The instrumentation was designed to withstand extremely high pressures, temperatures, and corrosive environments for many months.
In 2009 I joined a company in California that provided telecom companies with mobile network telemetry tools and also offered network optimization services. There I created a custom database that was highly optimized for our workloads, built our own RPC system, and wrote the first parser for Ericsson LTE layer 2 network data. That company was later acquired by Tektronix (after I left).
In 2013 I joined Airbnb where I worked on the data infrastructure team. I contributed to a number of open source projects during that time, including the Apache Mesos project which I became a PMC member of. I also contributed to Chronos, SmartStack, Kafka, and other projects during my time at Airbnb.
In 2015 I joined Mesosphere to continue working with Mesos. Mesosphere was founded by 2 of my Airbnb teammates, as well as a Twitter employee (the creator of Mesos itself). I helped scale the company, build the sales team, and laid the foundation for the service organization.
In 2018 I joined Braze, but decided to leave after just 6 months to start a new company, which in hindsight was a poor decision.
After several years going HAM at wantrepreneuring, I’ve decided to spend my time on things with a higher likelihood of success than moonshot startups.
You can find a copy of my résumé here.
Public Speaking #
I’ve given talks at a number of different events including conferences, meetups, and private engagements. Some of the conferences I’ve spoken at in the past are QCon, All Things Open, MesosCon, ContainerCon, LinuxCon, and others.
Open Source #
I’ve contributed to a long list of open source projects over the years. I am probably most well known for creating a project called Conky. Today I have more than 150 public GitHub projects, 2 of which have over 1,000 stars, 6 with over 100. Here are some of my projects:
- Conky, a system monitor for X
- ThetaGang, an implementation of “the wheel”, an options trading strategy
- dryoc, a pure-Rust general purpose cryptography library, based on the libsodium (which is based on the legendary NaCl from djb)
- cracking-the-coding-interview-rust, solutions to interview problems from the book “Cracking the Coding Interview”, in Rust
- genserver, an Elixir GenServer inspired Rust library
- optimal-buy-cbpro, a Coinbase Pro trading bot for dollar cost averaging into “cryptos”, if you like that sort of thing
- The HODLer Manifesto, a short manifesto on HODLing
- tweet-delete, a Twitter bot for deleting your tweets
- mother-of-dragons, a miner management tool for DragonMint/Innosilicon mining hardware
- labhub, a bot for integrating GitLab CI with GitHub open source projects
- doge-streamer, a tool for streaming multiple webcams of my dog Doge from my apartment when I’m away, in order to take the edge off the separation anxiety I feel when I leave her alone
Writings #
I’ve published many things over the years, in addition to the content on this blog, and much of it has been lost to internet rot. Here are a few things you can still find:
- Code Like a Pro in Rust, my first Rust programming book (note: this is an affiliate link)
- Rust Design Patterns, my second Rust programming book (note: this is an affiliate link)
- Programming in Rust: the good, the bad, the ugly.
Photography #
I’ve always had an interest in photography, and my blog features plenty of my original photography. You are welcome to use the imagery under the terms of the CC0 1.0 license if you’d like, which permits you to do whatever you want with it (no attribution required). Here’s one example of some photos.
Videography #
I have a neglected YouTube channel, and I occasionally streamed on Twitch in the past, but I lack the passion these days. Notably, my work was featured in a documentary about WeWork on Hulu (for some reason, I still haven’t received my internet money for that contribution).
Some of my YouTube content feels a bit cringe to me now, but I leave it out there anyway because some people seem to enjoy it 🙂
Adventures #
I’ve climbed mountains, run marathons, and done some long-distance cycling (randonneur style). Here are a few examples:
- I biked from SF to NYC unassisted in 27 days. I recorded a daily video log on YouTube
- I raced the Wolfpack Hustle Crash Race before the 2012 LA marathon, crashed 1 mile before the finish line, made it back to the start of the marathon, and then finished the marathon in under 4 hours
- I biked to the summit of Mauna Kea, a volcano in Hawaii, unassisted. The climb to Mauna Kea’s summit might be the longest continuous vertical climb in the world (from sea to summit is over 13,000ft in vertical gain)
- I biked from SF to Chico, through the northern Sierra Nevadas, and then on to summit Mount Shasta
Contact #
If you’d like to get in touch with me, the best way is good old-fashioned email, but please don’t contact me about products, services, or investment opportunities.
This Website #
The source code for this website is available on GitHub.