this is basically a more casual version of my resume and work experience.
i wanted to focus on learning about ai and how to make money outside of traditional employment (including consulting / freelancing).
this was when i developed all of the ai apps i shared on the projects page (and more that i didn’t share that were earlier prototypes and apps that were more like simple wrappers).
eyris is a company that was exploring ways to use private blockchain networks for enterprise security level applications for the government.
the role involved standing up a stable Besu private IBFT network of nodes, and building different applications on them to demo different capabilities that may have been interesting to potential customers.
i worked on making the network deployment from scratch much faster by automating it using terraform.
i also explored some interesting research-based projects for potential demo applications such as using zero knowledge proofs for communication between medical facilities and insurance companies without compromising user privacy.
i opted not to renew the contract to pursue some of my own ideas.
this was an awesome job. i landed it in part due to my entrepreneurial journey of building tabu art (the nft art marketplace) and my experience integrating stripe with it beyond just a simple checkout page example.
but this was entirely new territory for me because i had always worked as engineer. so i had a learning curve, but it didn’t feel that rough. i joined pre-sales calls as a technical expert, along with an account executive, to help learn about what problems our potential customers had. i had to map that back to our product suite and think about things like what product would work for them, what would their specific api setup look like, what kinds of legal issues would we need to get clarification on, and so on.
the goal was to make sure that i helped align the customer at this early stage with exactly what they needed to do in order to integrate stripe and solve their most pressing payments problems. if i did my job right (along with the rest of the deal team), they could go on to execute the integration plan i gave them and go live as quickly as possible.
the role involved keeping up with and more deeply learning stripe’s api (which is a lot of ground to cover!), learn how to ask the right questions to discover real pain points, figure out where to go get any number of questions answered (legal questions, deep product questions, roadmap questions, architectural questions regarding proposed solutions, and so on), help push the deal cycle along and reveal our proposed solution, clarifying that we’re all on the same page about the solution, then creating a nice integration plan for the customer’s technical team to implement.
it was one of the most interesting roles i had, but i ultimately realized it was too far away from the technical work i wanted to do. i enjoyed finding new corners of the stripe api and learning how it worked and when they would be useful, learning about edge cases, building demos for customers, etc.
towards the end of my time there, i - with my manager’s blessing - started asking some technical teams if they would take me on as an engineer. i had a lot of great conversations and found at least two teams i could switch to, but the entire company had a freeze on hiring and transfers. it turns out this was due to them preparing for their big 2022 layoff of 11%, by which i was affected along with 90% of my team.
this is the nft art marketplace i worked on and described in more detail on the projects page.
this was an incredibly awesome job to get out of college. i didn’t start learning to code until maybe 2011 or so (my ~sophomore / junior year) which could be said to be pretty late in life. i forced myself to use linux once i got into coding, and eventually found myself enamored with computer security. one Christmas i got the book Hacking: The Art of Explotation, and i was hooked.
i spent my last 6 months in college devouring the corelan exploit series blog tutorial and learning how vulnerability research and exploitation worked, and was able to land an internship with a small team at raytheon focused on computer security research.
i started out with a simple task of looking for vulernabilities in a simple internal java web application. it was gruntwork nobody wanted to do and was considered boring. i remember that was the about the time i learned how to use grep, and i blew that application wide open.
from there i continued to pick up tasks that nobody wanted to do and kept quickly learning. i even helped create some contrived security training exercises, writing all kinds of random python security scripts, and whatever else i could get my hands on. i became more comfortable using tools like ida disassembler to read and understand what was happening for architectures like x86/64 and different mips variants. i even got to write some kernel-level code which was a pretty valuable learning experience.
i eventually “graduated” and got the chance to work on one of the hottest teams where i could actually do more open ended research on harder stuff, and occasionally build proof of concepts for cves. i managed in a few cases to find critical issues like hidden backdoors in some expensive networking equipment, and even created a full end-to-end exploit of a bug i found, with a multi-stage payload to end up controlling the device.
around mid-2017, most of my good friends had moved up to the office near washington dc, and i decided to transfer up there along with them. and this is when my career there took a turn from being focused on security research to more of a developer role. for ~1-2 years i worked across a few teams on established products where they needed a developer and to work on embedded realtime systems, to mobile devices, to higher level applications like browser clever browser fingerprinting solutions.
i eventually got the chance to lead the (i think objectively) highest impact project there. and it was a humbling experience. the team had been working on this product for years, and they were all incredibly talented. my job was to try and rescue the project because the previous tech lead had literally been defrauding the company and not doing their job. the engineers were left to deal with the mess and couldn’t focus on the product, and the most experienced engineer was on the verge of quitting. so my job was to come in, get the project back on the rails, and remove any and all obstacles so they could continue delivering, and our key engineer could happily do the work we needed him to do.
it was tough taking a step back from doing technical work, but highly rewarding to help turn things around and let them focus on what they did best and stay on track. we hit every release after that and were able to keep a strong relationship with our customer and retain our key engineer for the project.
in the months leading up my departure from raytheon, i knew i was getting close to wanting a change. so i was able to find someone to shadow me for a few months to get a feel for the role. in the end, i was able to hand it off smoothly to ensure they didn’t have another crisis.