Senior Protocol Engineer

Govrn

Building tooling for digital organizations and their contributors

In my most recent role at Govrn, a platform for reporting and recording contributions to digital organizations, I developed and maintained our backend infrastructure based on Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog, Prisma, Postgres, Redis, and NATS + Jetstream, in addition to ensuring consistency between our smart contracts and our web application. In addition to maintaining and improving our infrastructure, I also grew my areas of contribution to include more of a proudct and feature focus. I was able to quickly propose, design, ship, and operat new features on our platform, including everything from developing feature specs to deploying and running the feature on our infrastructure.

Leveraging Python, Typescript / Node + Express, automated testing, a robust CI/CD pipeline in Github Actions, and quick feedback cycles, I was able to propose, design, and ship key features for our platform like Twitter integration, contribution tipping, and robust contribution visualizations.

For example, I designed and shipped Verification Frameworks, a powerful tool letting different communities configure parameters for verifying member contributions. We anticipated the need for this while researching other blockchain communities. While our users were initially skeptical of the value, its utility became clear once spam contributions started flooding a few users. Contribution verification was able to provide a robust, flexible way for our users to eliminate spam contributions from their communities.

Software Engineer I & II

Microsoft

Scaling the Azure Networking control plane at planet scale

After my previous internship on the Azure Software Defined Networking team, I came back for a full time role. My work focused on the scalability, reliability, and modernization of the Azure Software Defined Networking control plane.

Every creation, update, or deletion of virtual networking resources came through our regional controller; each time a customer updated their virtual network, our service needed to drive a corresponding update in our physical network and data plane. My focus during my time in Azure Networking was on delivering scalability and reliability improvements and delivering new SDN features to our product offerings.

I led several efforts to

- remove single points of failure from our architecture, vastly augmenting our reliability

- modernize and transition our services to use an event-driven/PubSub paradigm, enabling new customer scenarios at massive scales previously infeasible

- equip our services for Availability Zone awareness, providing customers with a new level of availability guarantees

- release a new top level resource (Network Profiles) to allow our Azure Container Instance (ACI) customers to access and interact with a rich existing set of SDN features

- mentor junior developers on our team, and establish a strong culture of knowledge sharing and documentation

among others.

Programmer

University of Michigan

Programming and designing experiments for a digital ergonomics lab

During my time as a computer science student at the University of Michigan, I worked as a programmer at an ergonomics research lab in the Industrial Operations Engineering department of the engineering college. I aided the research team in implementing experiments which were designed to test various aspects of human-computer interactions (HCI), UI/UX, and usability of mission-critical interfaces.

In order to test the feasibility of using touch screens in commercial airliners, for instance, the FAA commissioned our lab to run experiments on participants in a flight simulator. I integrated an Android tablet on a solenoid-driven mounting arm to simulate the effects of turbulence. Using an Arduino to control the frequency and amplitude of the sinusoid driving the position of the mounting arm and tablet, while the participant was also operating the flight simulator, we would ask them to manipulate and navigate touch screen controls on a custom Android app I wrote and uploaded to the device. This approach enabled us to get good data on the efficacy of touch screens in mission-critical operations.

Another experiment I implemented focused on the integration of an eye-tracking unit into a NASA attention testing application. Study participants would interact with the application, and complete various tasks which would place strain on their attention and focus (e.g. ensuring UI components are correctly configured, answering arithmetic questions, etc). I integrated support for changing the application's appearance in response to participant focus on certain parts of the screen. This involved writing multithreaded code in VB.NET to asynchronously consume data from the eye tracker, and to dynamically alter the UI in response to this. In addition to this, I created a simple "script" format for the researchers to be able to describe different scenarios (e.g. blink this component, flash this one for two seconds).