What I've been up to recently.
- September 2023: Gave a lightning talk at the fifth annual Congressional Hackathon on using generative AI to generate bill summaries on Congres.gov (slides). My idea was listed as a top action item by the organizers, which include bipartisan House leaders and the Chief Administrator's Office (CAO), in their final hackathon report.
- July 2023: Secured a fellowship placement with the Senate Finance Committee under Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). As a fellow, I hope to work on modernizing service delivery at essential agencies and social benefits programs under Finance's jurisdiction, including IRS, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and unemployment insurance.
- June 2023: Started as a Congressional Innovation Fellow at TechCongress. Attended the Cyber Civil Defense Summit, hosted by UC Berkeley and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
- February 2023: Served as a mentor at HackIllinois 2023, UIUC's first in-person hackathon since 2020. I specifically offered support with web development, backend configuration and deployment, and integrating with external APIs.
- January 2023: Reviewed applications for Coding it Forward's 2023 fellowships.
- October 2022: Switched from a product-centered, application team (specifically, one that supported Flexport warehouses and other consolidation products) to a domain-centered, platform team. I'm currently focused on transitioning Flexport from a messy, legacy system for modeling shipment execution to a new, domain-driven system.
- September 2022: Mentored an outstanding software engineering intern and wrote a blog post highlighting the projects of several others: What The Interns Shipped.
- June 2022: Released
notion-backup-ocaml(post). - April 2022: Attended the Disinformation And The Erosion of Democracy conference, hosted at the University of Chicago.
- March 2022: Finished the Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change evening course. Hosted by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein (the authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot), the course prompted me to think about theories of change at my company in particular and for the tech industry in general.
- January 2022: Reviewed dozens of applications for Coding it Forward's 2022 fellowship cohort. Contributed six ethics-themed problems to UIUC's CS 124: Introduction to Computer Science course, spanning topics like personalized ads and marketing, automation and job loss, data privacy, and surveillance technology; three of those problems were formally integrated into the curriculum. (My collaboators and I also authored a paper about our work!)
- August 2021: Started as a full-time software engineer at Flexport.
- May 2021: Graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Started as a Civic Digital Fellow at the General Services Administration, focused on improving internal documentation systems. I also gave a talk at the PIT Student Leaders Conference about my efforts to push for more robust computing ethics education at Illinois.
- April 2021: Built Ethical Moderation, a programming project designed to teach students about the techniques and ethical considerations of automated content moderation through hands-on implementation. This project was crated during HackIllinois 2021, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's annual hackathon.
- November 2020: Gave a talk to SIGPLAN, a student group at the University of Illinois for students interested in programming languages, about some of the lessons I learned building open-source software.
- April 2020: Released tailwind-ppx, a Reason/OCaml Pre-Processor eXtension (PPX) that validates your Tailwind CSS classes at compile-time; the project would eventually hit 150 stars on GitHub. In the same month, I also gave a talk about Functional Programming, React, and Compilers in ReasonML at the Chicago ReasonML Meetup.