Here's an unordered, incomplete list of people I've worked with (excluding present coworkers) whose experience, success, or skills made me say "what the fuck, how did they do that?"
| Name | How we met | Why they are worth knowing |
| Elliott Jin | Elliott was my roommate a few years ago, then my tutor at Bradfield School of Computer Science. | Elliott is a superbly competent competitive programmer, but also an extremely patient teacher who goes out of his way to meet his students' needs. |
| Oz Nova | Oz founded Bradfield and taught several of the classes I took there. | Oz has an encyclopedic level of knowledge about numerous foundational computer science areas (algorithms, distributed systems, and networking to name a few), and is a fantastic teacher. |
| Michael Bock | Michael and I were in one of my reading groups at Bradfield, and worked together at an unspecified previous company. | Michael has some really crazy experience in the self-driving industry, and has also worked at some top-tier companies on impactful projects. |
| Alexa Greenberg | Alexa worked on a team adjacent to mine at Uber ATG. | When I first looked at Alexa's resume, my initial reaction was "why am I even bothering to compete with people in this field?" She has a wealth of experience from numerous elite teams (Google X, Google Search, Google Brain), and was really amazing to work with. |
| Brian Corbin | Brian was the first engineer at PokitDok Inc. and effectively functioned as the main Staff Engineer for the company. | Brian was able to keep PokitDok's entire stack in his brain and could contribute at virtually any layer of it. He was a completely tireless example of the "10x engineer" and never had a foul word to say about anyone or anything. |
| Ryan Bourgeois | Ryan and I worked together at Zenreach Inc where he was the de-facto CTO. | Simply put: the one time while I was at Zenreach when shit hit the fan in production at 3AM, Ryan was the person I called. |
| Ryan Salsamendi | Ryan and I worked together at Morta Security, and then at Palo Alto Networks after it acquired Morta. | I don't know anyone else who can recite portions of the Intel x86 system programming manuals from memory. Ryan is probably the most seasoned "systems programmer" I know. |
| Rohan Kumar | Rohan was an intern on the Perception team at Uber ATG. | Rohan is probably the most impressive intern I've ever seen in my life. He joined our team and immediately contributed code to our project (with little guidance) that we still use long after he left. |
| Matthew Hall | Matt was a senior network security engineer at Morta Security. | I once watched Matt determine that a sequence of captured packets were actually from a malware program attempting to mimic legitimate traffic after he looked at the raw bytes for about 30 seconds and noticed that an SMTP timestamp field was invalid. I am not making this up. |
| Mik Kocikowski | Mik worked at PokitDok as an infrastructure / DevOps consultant. | Mik was a "John Wick" programmer. While the engineering teams at PokitDok had all kinds of internal problems and devolved into infighting, he routinely tuned it out and got shit done. I adopted his practice of writing Makefiles for project automation, and still use it to this day. |
| Yevgeni Litvin | Yevgeni was a staff engineer and my manager on the Perception team at Uber ATG. | Yevgeni embodies what I consider to be the core "10x" or "staff engineer" traits. He had a vast horizontal understanding of different teams at ATG, and was able to suggest work or contribute in places that would help unblock multiple people. He also was an expert in "how can solve this problem in the least disruptive way possible while still making the code better than it was before?" Yevgeni was an excellent mentor - he took me under his wing when I joined the Perception team, and I think of interactions we had while working together on a daily basis. |
| Mingjie Lai | Mingjie and I were in the same infrastructure group at ATG (I worked on the cloud subteam and he was the tech lead on the storage subteam). | Mingjie was another example of "staff engineer" for me. He embodied the "quiet professional" archetype, and was someone I could consistently rely on getting help from when I had any storage issues. He joined our team when we were struggling to support all of ATG's storage needs and almost single-handedly turned things around to the point that we were able to support hundreds of terabytes of ML training data being used concurrently by hundreds of engineers. |
| Nathan Goller-Deitsch | Nathan is my younger brother. | Nathan is an undergraduate at Clemson University. During high school, he was involved with his extracurricular robotics team, and does software engineering projects in his free time. He has a lifelong natural tendency to tinker and learned to program at age 6 (before I did). Nathan would make an excellent candidate for any kind of software engineering internship. |