I thought I'd write a little bit about how I got to where I am today. I have been coding, in some capacity, for about 11 years now.
Learning to code
At my fourth grade book fair there was a title that caught my attention: Coding for Kids. I am very thankful that my mom agreed to buy it for me. I worked through the book and made little programs in the Python 2.7 shell.
Story Book Parade
In middle school I had to wait a long time for the bus home from school. I spent this time working through my new book, JavaScript for Kids , in the browser console on the computers in the back of the classroom. Learning JavaScript was really exciting because I could see and interact with my programs. When my bus arrived, I would copy+paste my code into Google Docs for the next day.
ONLINE "SCHOOL"
When school went online for COVID in eighth grade I really didn't have much to do other than program all day. I spent a lot of time making games in Unity. The following year, I got very interested in web apps.
I joined my high school's FIRST robotics team, which is probably the reason for my interest in systems programming. We did basically everything in-house, including vision, which was a great learning experience. I was also obsessed with compilers around this time.
Getting a J*B
In my junior year of high school I was connected to the owner of WebCreek, a software company headquartered in Houston. I sent him my "resume": an email full of GitHub links to projects I worked on. After one non-technical interview, I started my internship working on training simulations for oil/gas and heavy machinery companies. I worked after school, on weekends and breaks, and sometimes in the middle of class, until I graduated.
NASA
After graduation, I spent my summer working at NASA's Johnson Space Center through an unpaid internship program for exceptional FIRST robotics students from Texas and California. This was extremely exciting because I got to work on some really interesting embedded and systems projects, and even on some equipment used for testing the VIPER lunar rover. Plus I got to work with some of my best friends.
NASA
I also had a second job during this time, since NASA was unpaid, doing firmware development for an educational robotics vendor. Definitely not doing two jobs again.
Microsoft
I spent the first few weeks of college being a complete degenerate, so I had to lock in on the internship grind. I submitted over 300 applications, resulting in only 7 interviews, and 6 offers. I spent my summer interning at Microsoft at the Redmond headquarters, working with the Azure Compute Host Networking Team.
My work was primarily focused on implementing cross-region RDMA networking support for AI infrastructure. To make RDMA efficient over the RoCEv2 on the WAN we implemented forward error correction methods to significantly reduce tail latency. This enabled OpenAI (and Microsoft AI) to concurrently train LLMs across multiple datacenters in physically separated regions. Since energy demand restricts the number of GPUs in a single region, parallelizing across regions removes the ceiling for future models.
Microsoft
I also built a hyperscale load-testing system for quantifying the side effects of performing Live VM Migration (LM) over RDMA traffic in Microsoft datacenters. This prompted significant performance improvements in LM compared to traditional networking, without negatively impacting other customers' storage workloads. I also worked on some firmware patches and testing infra for the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter.
The work at Microsoft was very intellectually stimulating. In addition, I got to spend a lot of time exploring the Pacific Northwest with all the amazing people I met.
Research
In my second semester of college I was very bored because I had my Microsoft offer lined up, so I joined Dr. Dmitri Loguinov's Internet Research Lab. If you're interested check out my research page.
Continued on Research.
Citadel
This upcoming summer I will be interning at Citadel, a quantitative hedge fund, regarded as the most profitable hedge fund of all time. I will be working on commodities research engineering.