Here’s some of the stuff that I’ve worked on:
Economics
I spent many of my early years learning about and doing research in economics. I worked under Emily Oster (now a Professor at Brown) and Kerwin Charles (now the Dean of the Yale School of Management) to study the Black-White achievement gap.
I also assisted with Robert J. Gordon’s book “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”. I focused my research on the quality of American housing between 1870 and 1930.
In college, I was a research assistant for David Autor for his paper studying the removal of rent control in Cambridge, MA in 1995.
Ruby on Rails
For a few years, I was an active contributor to the Ruby on Rails web framework and made 85 commits, primarily to ActiveRecord, Railties, and some initialization methods.
I also worked on a Google Summer of Code project with Rails Core Team member Santiago Pastorino. We worked on improving the configuration and initialization of Rails applications, and specifically, on the ability to remove the singleton pattern to enable starting up multiple Rails instances at once.
Math
- Rain-induced Ejection of Pathogens from Leaves. I worked under Lydia Bourouiba and Tristan Gilet with a few other MIT research assistants to study how diseases spread across plants during rainfall. Previously, scientists believed that raindrops would fall onto a thin film of water on a leaf, splashing pathogens to other plants. We showed that a more likely mechanism was a slingshot-like flinging of water droplets when rain hits a leaf. We also developed math models to characterize this behavior.
Papers
- The Chaotic Dynamics of Aquatic Interactions. This paper studied limit cycles and interactions of different aquatic creatures. I love this paper because it demonstrates how seemingly simple equations can lead to the intricate dynamical systems characteristic of Chaos Theory.
- School Structure and Academic Achievement. Michael Mirski and I spent a few years studying the black white achievement gap under Emily Oster and Kerwin Charles. We showed that placing 6th graders into middle schools hurt academic achievement, especially black students.
- Security on Networks. Worked with Bonny Jain and Iris Xu to investigate infection spread across random graphs and the effectiveness of network security at preventing infection spread.
Open source software
- Quickselect. A Golang library to find the smallest k elements in a set. I originally wrote this for Assembled, but open sourced it because of the lack of selection algorithm libraries in Golang. Quickselect uses Hoare’s Selection Algorithm which is asymptotically optimal, but switches to a naive algorithm for small sets to optimize speed.
- Creditly. A credit card input form, written before the days when Stripe Elements and other credit card processing forms became ubiquitous and easily available.
- Wallace. A framework for training machine learning models with evolutionary algorithms. It takes in a dataset and determines the best machine learning model and parameters to use using differential evolution. It’s named after Alfred Russel Wallace, someone who never got any credit for his work on natural selection and evolution.
- EagerDB. A database management tool that predictively preloads queries and warms your SQL cache. Here’s the paper describing how it works.
Miscellaneous
- Course notes from MIT. In college, I took notes primarily in LaTeX, which means I’ve been able to accumulate a ton of interesting knowledge in digital form.
- How Garbage collection in Python works. I read the CPython garbage collection code and wrote a Quora post about it.
- Python implementation of perfect hashing. When I was learning to code, I would take algorithms that I learned in class and convert them into code. This is one of my favorites.
- I love building things, especially out of wood. Most of my woodworking creations can be found at doveandtail.com.