professional
I've been steadily — if not gainfully — employed since high school, and have acquired a number of unanticipated skills along the way. With luck my future employment won't center on my ability to fix a printer, sort mail, set up a corporate VPN, sell a product warranty, navigate a city, be a chauffeur, or monitor the comings-and-goings of seventeen-year-olds, but in this economy one can never be too sure. This list exists in full form chiefly to keep me from forgetting.
Manager, Data AnalysisHomestead Technologies, 2006–2009 Attempted to secure position programming; hired instead for mathematical aptitude. Analyzed company performance and provided decision support to executives. Designed sales compensation scheme which (may have) more-than-doubled revenue. Emphasized data accessibility and provided secure web interface to reports, individualized by employee. Earned own department and two employees. Modeled price sensitivity and vocally stood against price increases which later cost significant fraction of revenue. Learned that corporate buyout is financially nice but depression-inducing; came in third for quarter-mile time. Pioneered both March Is Moustache Month and Now Grill It Out. | details |
Research AssistantStanford Medical School, 2006–2007 Assisted in statistical programming and user interface design for software-based cancer detection. Determined that system was excellent at detecting citrus fruit. | details |
Web DesignerStanford OFTS, 2005–2006 Innovated and maintained the website of the Office of Freshmen and Transfer Students, and related properties. Migrated static site to /cgi-bin so that student content could be delivered dynamically and responsively. Improved GPA and discovered the benefits of a cushy job. | details |
Research AssistantStanford Department of Economics, 2004–2007 Coded and scraped address information for research into spatial monopolies in the asphalt market. Later, scraped data for use in contract research on antitrust and patent-gathering in the pharmaceutical industry. | details |
Orientation CoordinatorStanford New Student Orientation, 2004–2005 Co-led event planning and chaired website design. Won national award for Outstanding Orientation Website; the Internet Archive does not record this. Successfully delivered 1600 new students to their dorms and classes with a minimum volume of tears from parents. | details |
GraderStanford Department of Mathematics, 2004–2006 Graded peers' problem sets under the guise of alleviating graduate student stress. Came to understand the delicate balance of errors-in-grading and time-of-grading; derived optimal strategy. | details |
Undergraduate TutorStanford University Mathematics Organization, 2003–2006 Tutored undergraduate math courses, particularly calculus (of one and many variables), linear algebra, and differential equations. Developed useful teaching skills such as using a calculator and writing upside-down, and pointing left when I said "right." Learned persistence in attempting to explain concepts. | details |
Reunion Homecoming Team LeaderStanford Alumni Association, 2003–2007 Coordinated on-campus transportation and signage for Stanford reunions. Camped out in the golf cart parking lot to run dispatch for 70 hours over four days. Discovered that golf carts can climb stairs; hospitalized due to being run over by same. Learned intricacies of worker's compensation. | details |
IT SupportIron Age, 2003 Offered dial-in and dial-out support of the company network, setting up VPN connections remotely in twelve states and Puerto Rico. Learned to never say "click" when "left-click" is meant. Failed to receive a paycheck and similarly failed to receive appreciation for Windows networking. | details |
Residence AssociateColumbia University, 2003 Jointly RA'd a hall of rising high school seniors during a summer program at Columbia University. Hosted social events and trips around New York to keep students engaged. Encouraged teens to practice safe sex. | details |
Mail ClerkIkon, 2002–2003 Moved boxes for coworker. Innovated mail delivery by encouraging that the radio be tuned to top-40 rather than country (the hourly Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo was hitting morale). Learned to effectively sort large stacks of documents, a skill regularly applied while TAing. Wore protective anthrax clothing to thwart terrorists. Garnered respect by eating a Triple Baconator in less than one minute. | details |
CourierJet Messenger Service, 2002 Pedaled a bicycle around downtown Pittsburgh to deliver what I was asked. Competitive advantage since the only other courier company in town had just been shut down for insane workers' comp costs. Learned to work with ex-convicts. Due to the cost of Biggie-Sizing lunches (to maximize caloric intake) and the theft of a bicycle lock, made zero money. In light of this fact, tendered immediate resignation. | details |
Rep IBest Buy, 2001–2002 Wore camouflage to keep customers from knowing that I was an employee while stocking shelves. Learned how to properly throw a television, stereo system, or vacuum cleaner and then rebox it. Promoted to cashier because of my winning personality and ability to bullshit people into buying things they didn't need. Received death threats and was mentioned in a letter to the editor; quit to attend prom. Shortly after my resignation store management was terminated for presiding over the "highest-theft" store in the nation. | details |
programming
Coding helps me explore unusual, aesthetic questions. While it might be a stretch to classify the following as research proper, each represents something deeper than just-a-website. All can be played with to satisfy your own curiosity, although some need to be downloaded first.
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Fractal generator
HTML5 implementation of the splash page fractals, built to test real-time image generation prior to site upgrade. 2D rendering in WebGL is still an emerging feature, with especial pitfalls if the underlying optimization problems are not known in advance; there's a <canvas> backup for browsers that don't make the grade.
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Javascript Logo
A partial (yet fairly robust) implementation of the Microworlds dialect of Logo through Javascript and canvas. Documentation is as-yet nonexistent, but there are several examples to demonstrate basic features; the header graphics on this website are generated through the interpreter, so viewing source is another excellent tool. Currently there is no turtle icon moving around, since Inkscape runs like molasses on my machine.
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LaTeX to png
Generates png graphics from LaTeX math markup; although there are many similar services out there at present, back in 2008 this was pretty much the option. As of right now, I am hosting 87431 mathematical formulas available to the world, which proves that someone out there finds this useful.
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ROFLBOT
A locally-successful rock-paper-scissors runner-up, coming in second place in the first-and-last annual Homestead Rock-Paper-Scissors championship (where the only rule was to not implement Iocaine Powder). The primary challenge of this was not so much implementing a complex decision rule as it was implementing it in LOLCODE; I am proud of its performance given the constraints.
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YALI
A Perl interpreter for LOLCODE; now ships with FreeBSD. While cat macros have come and gone — and good riddance — this experiment in language design and implementation has proved fairly instructive downstream.
side-show
I relax by riding my bike, building things, brewing beer, and writing code. Outside of a few forum posts and a handful of pictures there's not much evidence of the first three, but last has the satisfying property of self-exposition. I haven't received any queries about acquisition, but only time will tell; in the meantime, I'm happy enough to have made some piece of the world a little more entropic.
All Android projects have been removed, as it became impossible for me to keep up with the rapidly-shifting requirements of the Android marketplace. Partially because of Google's constant need to deprecate platform APIs and increase marketing presence, and partially because I misplaced the packaging keys.
H A is for Acid Monkey An unforgettable photograph deserves a safe place in the pantheon of Internet lore. Since LNKD creams me in the search results for my own name, it's good to know that a search for "monkey on acid" will lead the world unknowingly my way, without fail. | details |
H burratr Have you ever been driving around town, gotten hungry, and thought, "Hey! I could use a burrito. But where should I go? Yelp won't work, since it's not burrito-specific. What's a guy to do?" Well search no more. This site is effectively deprecated, but provides everlasting documentation of a few holes-in-the-wall in the Menlo Park area (circa 2008). | details |
H eightbeers.org Old content from my halcyon days needed a server to give it new life, so it resides here. As of yet, nothing is "live" enough to make it to the homepage (due to the incompetent programming of youth), but someday Choose My Underwear will reappear. Get excited. | details |
B GemIdent I was asked by a friend to join a grant for development of a piece of software to identify cancer from stained biopsy slides. The software works quite well, although I'm unclear on how many (if any) lives were saved. | details |
H opensourcebar.org During the senior year of my undergraduate education, my roommates and I decided that the one thing we needed most was a homemade bar. Nine months, a few dozen kegs and a handful of grade points later we were moving out, but were not interested in losing our dear asset. We staged a second-price auction, and were to be rewarded with a cool $500 before Housing issued and ultimatum that the bar must be disposed of post haste. | details |
H ShabKyle.com Originally a website for wedding details, now the official site of my newly-founded nuclear family. A wedding photo search engine is up for interested parties. | details |
H Where is Kyle? Sometimes you just need to know where I am, right now. Problem solved. | details |