Stuff I’ve Done
This list is entirely from when I was in college. I can’t write about a lot of the work I’ve done at Jane Street, but rest assured that there have been plenty of interesting projects there, too.
Asana
I interned at Asana in 2015. I worked on their Security and Stability team, on which I designed and built a Zookeeper-coordinated system for managing security updates on their fleet of webservers. I also used Typescript, React, and a tiny bit of CoffeeScript to help build a rich text editor for Asana’s new UI framework.
Venmo Security
In Spring 2014, I took 6.857 (Computer and Network Security), taught by Ron Rivest. For our final project, Ben Kraft, Jordan Moldow, and I tried to reverse-engineer Venmo, a social payments app. We disclosed several issues to Venmo, which fixed them and invited us to their offices in NYC to present our work. We were mentioned on Slate, Yahoo News, Sophos’ Naked Security blog, and TechTarget.
MIT Educational Studies Program
I was an administrator and teacher for the MIT Educational Studies Program (ESP), a student group at MIT. ESP organizes programs in which college students teach middle- and high-school students about anything.
I co-directed Splash! 2013 for ESP. During Splash, around 2600 high-school students came to the MIT campus for a weekend to attend about 700 classes taught by over 500 volunteer teachers about almost anything. I made policy decisions, led a team of over 30 administrators, and coordinated our teachers and over 100 day-of volunteers.
I’ve taught ESP classes on math, puzzle hunts, cognitive biases, computer security, and beef.
I-HELP Liberia
During the summer of 2013, I went to Liberia for two weeks with the I-HELP Liberia Project. We developed and taught a teacher training program for 80 high-school math and science teachers in Kakata. We also ran a math contest for high school students in Monrovia.
MIT Mystery Hunt
I’ve participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle hunt compettion held on MIT’s campus, since 2010. In 2012, my team (Manic Sages) won, giving us the honor of writing the next year’s hunt. I wrote a puzzle and was featured in another. In 2014, my new team (One Fish, Two Fish, Random Fish, Blue Fish) won; we wrote the 2015 hunt.
zScore
I helped my friends write zScore, a website that lets you compete with others to get the most sleep. It’s kind of ugly, though.