If a résumé is the table of contents, and a CV the abridged version, then this is the content…

Origin

I’m a product of my parents, as most of us are. They met in Silicon Valley – my mother studying for her Master’s Degree, my father working as a Computer Engineer. So I come from a technical family. By the time I entered college, my father was working as a patent attorney (often for technical IP) and my mother was teaching highschool AP Computer Science and Web Development. I have an older sister and a younger brother; as a family we love to play games, work on puzzles, and submerge in mystery.

Core Principles

1. Value education: I love to learn, think, explore, and work through problems; I don’t sleep as well or attend to my other responsiblities if I am actively stumped – working on my equanimity!

2. Faith based: purpose driven, optimistic, and hopeful; introducing practicality into idealism can sometimes frustrate me – working on my balance!

3. Relationship focused: I believe in collaboration, mentor/mentee relationships, and meaningful conversations; as a peacemaker, I often give into or turn away from arguments – working on my conflict resolution!

The Early Days

As an undergrad I studied Electrical Engineering and Physics at the University of Delaware.
I then attended the University of Michigan for a PhD program in Applied Physics.
But after receiving my Master’s degree I left for a myriad of reasons, of which the most impactful two are as follows:

1. Discovery and the subsequent studying/exploring/practicing of Hinduism
2. Frustration with Academia, particularly the strong value on research over coursework coupled with the financial sources and motivations of such research (e.g. military, big pharma)

Post Graduation

What followed was a solo-trip to India for some soul searching, and I openly bare that I was much (if not more) my old self than (as I was trying to be) someone new.
Upon return I tutored middle school, high school, and undergraduate students at different times and in different (most gen ed) subjects. The Great Gatsby actually made sense to me; it had so much more life and meaning in this flipped perspective as an educator.
Finally, I worked on coding my first video game/simulation: Color Game.

Color Game

Perhaps it deserves its own post, but as of yet here are the highlights:
It was my first effort at self driven coding, beyond work in my highschool Java course and university C++ and Matlab projects.
After some research I chose Python (for it’s gentle learning curve) and PyGame as the game library.
I learned about and implemented a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture for my game:

• Model - user entity to control an initially uncolored “soul”; randomly generating colored entities as consumable “soul shards”
• View - game board/canvas with 2D pixel graphics
• Controller - game loop, interactions, and keyboard controls

Dooble

Landed my first official web application job in NYC.
Dooble was trying to be a double dating/meetup social application.
I was a javascript developer, across the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node)

• Foot in the door; drinking from a firehose

A tale of two careers: Formal & Informal

Dooble failed and I lost my job, so I found a junior web dev job in New Jersey and moved.

Billtrust

I was a small fish, drenched from a firehose, and now swimming in a bigger pond.
Billtrust, a billing and payments business-to-business (B2B) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, was a W/LAMP shop (Windows/Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and hired me as the Javascript guy.
As the Javascript guy, the goal was to migrate from jQuery to Single Page Applications (SPAs) via AngularJS.
The highlight was a full reskin of an existing application from jQuery to Angular components over the course of approximately 2-3 months:

• Worked closely with a part-time contract UI/UX designer
• Used Material Design as the basis
• Built an internal component library
• Refactored old views with new components
• Implemented new components in all new existing views

Ultimately, I learned full stack, agile development; I worked with product managers, DBAs, QA, DevOps, and of course other developers.

Startup Sabbatical

Well, time passed, seasons changed, and Billtrust was migrating from a monolith to microservices; management was a revolving door and scale was painful.
Between boredom and frustration, I was wanting for the startup world again!
Billtrust fully supported me (they were always great at relationships – I made a ton of friends and had a few great mentors along the way).

• So I co-founded an Ed Tech Startup called Knowledgine
• And I needed some money, so I started free-lancing for a company called Anatha

Knowledgine

The mission is to democratize education by democratizing educational leadership.
The problem is that professor lectures are mostly university siloed educational resources, trapped from the erudite minds of the life-long learners and eager youth alike.
The tech is a MEAN stack SPA, with a user portal for content consumption (watch, listen, tag, share, like, etc.) and a professor portal for content creation (lecture recording).

• Cloud infrastructure with AWS & Atlas
• Python scripting for professor cold emails to grow the network
• Python scripting for Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing (ML/NLP) of audio transcripts and word/phrase classification for topic relevance
• Node scripting for lambdas (run python scripts by spawning node processes)

Anatha Freelance

This was 2018, and crypto was the new hotness.
I landed a 3 month contract job to work on a blockchain/web3 application: smart crypto wallet

• Desktop application via Electron (JS)
• ReactJS, third party APIs to communicate with crypto chains
• D3 for data visualizations, amongst those where I solved a self-coined Boundary Problem
  • Pie chart visualization with labels for each slice of the pie
  • Crowded UI towards the “Boundary” for the smaller percentages
  • Easy solution is to label with “other”, but the percentanges were often crowded towards the lower end due to the nature of crypto coins portfolios (small holdings of alt-coins)
  • I set up a system of equations and solved for the boundary conditions to dynamically determine when and how to show the labels in different aesthetic ways

Return to Billtrust

Time had passed since my last foray with Billtrust, when a good friend and former colleague asked me to return as a contractor.
Billtrust was now a microservice shop with a C# backend, an Angular frontend, and a platform team for building out Identity and Access Management (IdAM) and an internal component library (UI/UX).
I was tasked with migrating an existing application from Material Design based components to the new internal components.
And so, a different season, a new day; a different app, a new reskin:

• The first thing I did was try to lose my job by recommending against the work (not worth the time cost and added insignificant product differentiation, IMO)
• The business desire to merge all applications under the framework prevailed, I kept my contract job
• Findings: worse performance than existing app
• Result: fixed performance issue for entire platform component library (thanks to AoT vs JiT compilation)

I was subsequently hired full time to work as full stack developer on greenfield apps and services.

Personal Sabbatical

Well, time passed (again), seasons continued to change, and Billtrust was hiring a multitude of off-shore resources; management was an ever expanding revolving door and scale was even more painful.
Between boredom and frustration, I was wanting to work my passions into a career:

• So I created this blog
• I began streaming variety video games and tried my hand at content creation
• And then I taught at The Frisch School

Cabosante

You are Here!

• Uses Static Site Generation (SSG) via Hugo and a TOML templating engine
• Has cloud server Github integration for automatic deployments
• Integrated blog content with daily streaming during my Stadia Advent
• Created and streamed a World of Warcraft metagame, called Legacy

Frisch

An unexpected experience of a lifetime!

• Private Jewish Modern Orthodox high school in North Jersey
• Teaching high school AP Computer Science and Honors/Accelerated Physics
• Fully remote (teaching over Zoom)
• Preparing CS students for AP exam (Java)

Anatha

It was time to work again, professionally.
Anatha had since raised money from the desktop wallet I helped develop while free-lancing.
The company even built its own blockchain and native cryptocurrency asset!
They wanted a crypto NFT platform and hired me as a technical lead for the onset:

• I worked with 2 other devs and 1 automation engineer on a NFT gallery application coupled with a blockchain indexer
• We chose Turborepo, NextJS (react), Vercel, and Node for our MVP stack
• We completed the MVP in May…

And then, the market crashed; the company lost major investments and let go of all development teams.

What’s next?

• Something professional - $$$ is helpful
• Something personal - food for the soul

Why not both?