so glad you made it! the owner of this site treats this like a myspace page crossed with a linkedin with a goodreads and spotify...
i am a founder, engineer, and researcher, currently living in NYC. i am a 25 year old woman and proud American. i have a partner who i live and travel with and a big fluffy dog named alan turing.
i am the founder of a company building large-scale onboarding to filecoin. think backblaze, for filecoin.
my free-time activities include some research and freelance development for money and fun.
things i like
i like to read. my partner is a big philosophy and religious studies guy and encourages me to read more. my favorites are pretty basic.
some books that made me think include the closing of the american mind by allan bloom, how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie, propaganda by jacques ellul, the antichrist by nietzsche, philosophical investigations by wittgenstein, various platonic dialogues but alcibiades the most (+ thomas taylor youtube videos)
darwin's descent of man, julian jaynes' bicameral mind, pessoa's book of disquiet, murakami 1q84, houellebecq particules elementaires, thomas ligotti conspiracy against the human race, de beauvoir's second sex, minima moralia, various random religious and myth texts, jung's aion and some surrounding secondary lit.
some composers i like include debussy, chopin, bartok, bach. some music i like that was released lately is mewithoutyou, mount kimbie, blood orange (and all other stage names), against all logic (and all his other names), and massive attack.
i think humans are generally pretty good. that's why i try to make my money by building people honest products that increase their autonomy and ability to make choices and learn without manipulation. currently the relevant layer of the stack I work on is usable encryption technology and better peer-to-peer networking. also, zk cryptography for financial privacy, and tools for more financial autonomy.
i like to be positive and see the bright side of everything possible. at the absolute worst, it was a learning experience! it's just a better way to be.
i like yoga and dance. i am not great at dancing. both are very fun and i like improving.
i like cooking and growing hydroponic herbs and vegetables in my tiny apartment. i also like fermenting things in my tiny apartment, to everyone else's chagrin.
i work in crypto. yes, it IS 95% scams, yes, my soul DOES hurt, yes, these people DO suck and i'm worried I'm becoming like them. enough said.
i do not like EAs or rationalists and my opinions here broadly align with this essay, which i am extremely thankful to be able to link to, so grateful that someone shares my feelings about them and wrote them up more concisely and correctly than I ever could dream to. i do not like people with strong political opinions, as someone who has sworn off strong political opinions. i do not like people who can't be silly and i do not like people who can't be serious. if you try to manipulate me into buying things i don't need, you are my enemy. i really like people who have read and internalized the question concerning technology. i like people who are genuinely kind.
one day i would like to go to music school or do an economics or evobio phd.
talks and other things outside of work (under construction!)
- Enterprise PMF for Filecoin (my company's market research... delivered in Reykjavik Iceland in Sept 2023 at the FilDev conference)
- Game theory of a trustless CDN (talk delivered on HTTP Gateways track of IPFS Thing- Brussels, April 17 2023- look at the speaker notes!) (I need to be harassed to finish formalizing this!)
- Wrote a cool little batched-private-defi-execution app for ethereum with Lev Stambler for the Zuzalu ZK hackathon. It is not done, but I mostly focused on the sequencer and the solidity, and we co-created the design (April 2023)
- Hire me to write your Rust blockchain and ZK code, hourly! if I don't have time, I have tons of friends that I can introduce you to. Notable examples: I helped modify Nova to add levs57's Folding Endgame, affectionately dubbed Moon-Moon, and have been working on (and community-managing contributions for) a Rust rewrite of Aztec's Barretenberg here.
- I do some things with smart transactions too. i like formal verification and symbolic execution very much! on occasion i have been known to write Rust HFT bots with most of a JIT compiler in them. intents are the *wrong* solution!
past present future lives:
- 2022: Founded my company, where we build backblazey products for filecoin using WNFS. been doing that + research on the side since :)
- 2021-2022: Filecoin engineer on FVM and the node software/core runtime
- 2021: chaotic DeFi freelance period. Implemented the Berlin hard fork of HEVM. Outside of that, did a lot of shitcoining, mechanism design, cryptography auditing, and solidity auditing.
- 2020-2021: UChicago taught Master's in machine learning- lots of theory- dropped out to freelance for DeFi summer. Did some (sloppy, fast) research on visualizing generalization in deep neural nets by studying how mistaken labeling in one class impacts error rate in other classes by computing the KL-divergence between distributions. Made a poster and a short rough draft of a paper right before I dropped out.
- 2020: Trail of Bits Cryptography auditor and ZK researcher on DARPA SIEVE grant. I wrote circuit compilers (not public) and some rust security tooling.
- 2016-2020: UChicago undergraduate- CS and one final short of math (dropped out to make money for DeFi summer- don't worry! my in-major GPA was not bad... was tired of school). Did some cool research with using t-SNE to cluster Bitcoin wallets and do some very crappy chainalysis in 2018, for a class, and I can't find the paper.
- summer 2019: Jane Street SWE/security internship (including writing Noise/part of Wireguard in OCaml- see my Github)
- summer 2018: Dropbox cybersecurity internship
- 2017-2020: Lots of TA jobs, including algorithms & graduate distributed systems classes, at UChicago. Also gave lots of cybersecurity, and blockchain talks to other undergrads.
- 2017-2020: Lots of sysadmin and IT jobs, including on the UChicago Midway supercomputer
- 2016-2017: Wolfram Algorithms R&D Intern, Signal Processing and Digital Image Processing
- 2013-2016: TJHSST (rowing, cello, CTFs, lots of fun classes!)
- 2015-2016: Accelerator Physics research at UMD/IREAP, on the UMER electron ring (slides) and Rutgers 12" Cyclotron (slides, paper)
github is here!