Professional

Fullstack programming is my core skillset (with a focus on web engineering).

I have been programming & building Internet businesses since ~16 — working with a variety of languages, frameworks, & tools.

I deeply value being multidisciplinary. In all aspects of life, but especially in building products.

Candid Career Summary:

• • founded, grew, & sold BackToBackSWE

  Single-handedly grew a YouTube channel from nothing to 200k subscribers over ~2 years (while in college). Grew a mailing list to ~70k subscribers. Sold the site to private equity in Nov ’20.

  BackToBackSWE was one of the largest & most-loved DS/A-focused (Data Structures & Algorithms) software engineering interview prep YouTube channels during the ’18–’20 period.

  There was a gap for ~2–3 years after Leetcode grew in popularity (in ~2017) to create better video explanations for software engineering interview problems. AlgoExpert ended up taking up most early market share (more credible founders, distributed better, product solidified to become better), reaping millions in profits.

  ~’21/’22 the DS/A market started becoming commoditized, with YouTubers creating large content libraries for free & a flood of new paid courses. (there still existed a large gap for a central system design instructional authority since that content is much harder to create, which since has been filled by ByteByteGo).

  I partnered with the wrong co-founder, made a few fatal missteps on ownership, & ultimately sold the company too early.

• • 2x intern @ Twitter on the twitter.com team

  (& joined full-time)

  Very much lucked out on getting the first internship, the 2nd was a follow-on. Was a defining professional programming experience for me & got me focused on Web engineering. It was also my first time visiting/living in San Francisco.

  Joined full-time in late ’21, but left shortly after to take a sabbatical in early ’22. I was very much burned-out from how BackToBackSWE ended & wanted to take a break to rebalance in other areas of life.

• • founded interviewpen.com

  (fizzled out over ~1.5 years)

  Frustrated with how things ended with BackToBackSWE, after ~8 months of sabbatical in 2022 I wanted to go back & build the product I wish I had built the first time around.

  After launching (basically the same product w/ a plan for a system design focus as well) in early ’23, I realized the market had moved on & become heavily saturated. There was no opportunity left to fill a gap & build a real business (w/o a very specific personal brand).

  I struggled to find a system design co-founder since it was a very niche skillset (exceptional verbal communicator, deep system design understanding — not already working in Big Tech/trading, making entrepreneurship less appealing).

  Eventually I was introduced to

  Bobby

  who led the development of the system design vertical for the site. He is the most fun individual I’ve ever worked with & the fastest learner I know.

• • onsite.dev

  (did not launch)

  In September of ’23 while still running Interview Pen, I moved to San Francisco to work on a real-time mock interviewing platform for software engineers. It seemed the next natural thing to work on, the course business was faltering & real-time LLM-based AI conversation was becoming more & more technically feasible every month.

  The developer experience was nascent to non-existent for this use-case at the time, so I found myself hacking together a solution, dealing with raw audio bits on server & client, and stringing together 3 lossy stages of transcription, LLM inference, & text-to-speech.

  Only in ~May ’24 did true audio-to-audio models get foundationally solved for with GPT-4o.

  My co-founder left the project that December (we did not see eye-to-eye on our respective long-term commitment/risk profile). I would stop working on the project in ~April/May ’24 since I did not want to found a business alone (I knew how hard it was).

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