What I'm doing now

Now

October 4, 2024

Update: I live in Boston now!

Hereā€™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 Areaā€¦ SPLASH in two weeks is still on though! See you in Pasadena!
  • I bought some furniture. Itā€™s an investment, and a way to say, ā€œIā€™m here to stay for a while.ā€ - 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. Canā€™t wait to watch the secondā€¦ and the 1984 one. But Iā€™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, youā€™ll have to come to Boston.

Whatā€™s next:

  • Investing fully in where I am and what Iā€™m doing right now.

August 14, 2024

Late summer.

Iā€™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:

Whatā€™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, hereā€™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 MITā€™s CS PhD program. Iā€™ll be deferring for one year, to start in Fall 2025.
  • I got a cat (okay, Iā€™m fostering a cat).

On the horizon:

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.