Now

October 4, 2024

Update: I live in Boston now!

Here’s what happened:

• Nectry got an office in Cambridge. We are now stationed at Aethos. I am enjoying lots of free lattes, delivered instantly to me by a machine! The wonders of technology! Though I do often miss the tiny cafe across the street from where I lived in Brooklyn.
• I scrambled to find an apartment.
• I abandoned my plans to go to Mammoth, Washington, the Bay Area… SPLASH in two weeks is still on though! See you in Pasadena!
• I bought some furniture. It’s an investment, and a way to say, “I’m here to stay for a while.” - I went to NEPLS, which was really fun! I finally met Shriram Krishnamurthi, Will Crichton, and Ragit Nigam.
• I finally finished Dune and watched the first movie. Can’t wait to watch the second… and the 1984 one. But I’m waiting for the moment to be right. I will know it when it comes.

Boston has been very good to me so far. I expect to stay here, bar temporary absences, for about 6-8 years. If you find yourself in Boston before 2032, shoot me a message! Or put another way, if you want to experience me still in my 20s, you’ll have to come to Boston.

What’s next:

• Investing fully in where I am and what I’m doing right now.

August 14, 2024

Late summer.

I’m still working at Nectry. We are slowly growing our engineering team and it has been wonderful to welcome Jackson to the company.

What has transpired:

• Visited Liz and Devin in Philadelphia—my first time in the City of Brotherly Love.
  • We should bring back dueling professors for their jobs. I beat Stephanie Weirich at board games in her own home; this should entitle me to a tenure-track appointment.
• Cartwheel found a home with Rana in Berkeley.
• I saw the mind-boggling cutting edge of serverless computing with LLMs at Val Town HQ with JP Posma and Steve Krouse.
• I learned to walk without rhythm.
• Finally met Geoffrey in person, at South Park Commons where he gave an excellent keynote on malleable software in Patchwork.
  • I also got to meet Lu Wilson and Linus Lee, and the lovely folks at Websim.
• Gave a talk for the students at Fractal Bootcamp.
• I moved out of my Brooklyn apartment and went back home to Los Angeles.
• Visited my cousins in Colorado, where I experienced the excitement of Boulder thunderstorms and the joy of family reunion.

What’s next:

• Spending time with family!
• Driving around the West Coast!
  • Mammoth Lakes!
• Volunteering at SPLASH in Pasadena!
• Reading, writing!
• Likely returning to Boston soon, to stay for a while!

April 23, 2024

It has been 7 months since my last confession.

I intended to write an update in late January or early February, but I got frustrated with the bespoke ad hoc templating system I was using to generate this website and I spent a while redesigning that at a leisurely pace. Now it is completed and I can actually focus on the content!

So, here’s what happened:

• I graduated from Columbia with my Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics.
• I was admitted to some PhD programs in computer science.
• I moved to Brooklyn.
• I started my new job at Nectry.
• I went to Switzerland.
• I accepted my offer of admission to MIT’s CS PhD program. I’ll be deferring for one year, to start in Fall 2025.
• I got a cat (okay, I’m fostering a cat).

On the horizon:

• NJPLS at NYU.
• Walking at graduation.
• Summer in New York! Queen’s Night Market, Smorgasburg, the Nitehawk, and all good things in the sun.

September 28, 2023

Seventh (and final?) semester of undergrad. I am loaded up with classes, so I don't have much time for research and personal projects. Instead, my focus is on my coursework:

• Learning language design in a seminar with Bjarne Stroustrup
• Working as a teaching assistant for both formal verification and parallel functional programming
• Studying point-set topology and algebraic topology at the same time, for some reason
• And a few classes for fun and core requirements: fiction writing, Judaism and Israeli cinema

It's a busy schedule, but quite exhilarating. Today I led our language design seminar in a discussion of Alan Kay's HOPL paper on Smalltalk—a paper which led to some powerful epiphanies about object-oriented design, end-user programming, and computer science education.

I've found the time to binge-watch the first two seasons of Community. It seems everyone has seen it already, but this party is so great I have no qualms being late to it.

Plans on the horizon: a couple of trips around the Northeast, including NJPLS; grad school applications; graduation; seeing my dogs back home.