Highlander Robotics is a FIRST Robotics Competition team of 9th to 12th graders. I joined as the second Lead Mentor for the team's rookie season in 2019 when we were still in a garage with 11 students. We now have a roster of 55 and have qualified for the World Championship every year it's been an option (3 years, sans covid). We teach students programming, mechanical design, fabrication, business, strategy, leadership, and team work over an 11 month program. I have taught software principles and architecture, mechanical fabrication on CNC and manual machines, and organizational leadership. I've designed and implemented various curricula from scratch and adapted others when appropriate. I've mentored our student leadership and been ultimately responsible for a $100k/yr budget and adult volunteer base that puts in thousands of hours per year.

Raising children. Volunteering. Mentoring. Tinkering.

Code quality, testability, and forward facing architecture on device and server.

With the Domains team (Aug '17 - May '18) built tools to improve developer productivity, vetted next generation architecture proposals, investigated new technologies, advocated for best practices, and advised Siri leadership on curating engineering culture. Was third contributor to the framework that would become Swift NIO.Worked with the Natural Language Understanding team (June '16 - Aug '17) to establish a strong engineering culture. Wrote engineering guidelines and drove consensus with senior leadership. Mentored senior developers. Drove substantial improvements in code reuse and testability. Improved agility of model deployments.

Founding tech lead of the Proactive Intelligence group. Lead development of Found In Mail, an on-device search engine that consumed content from Mail, extracted structured event and contact information, and provided that data to first party applications in iOS 8 / 9 and OS X Yosemite / El Capitan. Coordinated work with more than one dozen engineering teams across iOS and OS X. Liaised with design and privacy teams. Wrote and promoted a demo script later adapted for use in WWDC keynote. Promoted to manage the group in April of 2015 with 8 direct reports. Cross team/functionally managed development of Proactive Caller-ID (Maybe: ...), Proactive QuickType, App Connections, natural language event extraction and self identification from Messages, and Found in Apps in iOS 10 and OS X Sierra.Named on Patents US20160360382A1, US20160360336A1 - Systems and Methods for Proactively Identifying and Surfacing Relevant Content on a Touch-Sensitive Device

Made major contributions to server infrastructure and feature development of Cue - a personal search engine and intelligent assistant. Conceived of, designed and implemented a fault tolerant and coordinated data pipeline capable of processing millions of documents per minute on hundreds of servers. Implemented push notification scheduling, in-file search, query parsing, relevant person detection, portions of the search core, and api crawlers for a dozen services. Established initial monitoring, alerting, and metrics collection systems. Actively cultivated an engineering culture that emphasized code quality, automated testing, tool building, and reducing the cost of experimentation.Cue was acquired by Apple in the fall of 2013.

Helped to redesign and overhaul the existing Bing.com summarization engine for clarity, performance, and flexibility. Redesigned and implemented the highlighting system from scratch. Redesigned the internal representation of query words and associated matching algorithms. Designed a query augmentation system which allowed trivial injection of external data. Mentored developers on modern C++ design techniques and general software engineering practices.Recieved the Gold Star Award for work on highlighting in search results.

As primary Ruby performance investigator I worked in all parts of the organization to optimize codebase. Achieved 30% speedup of overall time spent in query reformulation. Implemented second and designed third drafts of Thrift project's Ruby API, and became a PMC member when it became an Apache project. Achieved 15-23x speedup in Ruby Thrift serialization. Designed and implemented multinode load-balanced continuous integration system used for over one hundred projects on 8 machines and 3 architectures. Designed and implemented self service cluster management system used for hundreds of machines which leveraged Amazon's EC2. Designed and implemented seamless integration of RubyGems and RPM based packaging system. Evangelized proper development practices and mentored developers. Vetted competency of Ruby candidates. Recruited 7 engineers, over 10% of the company.Powerset was acquired by Microsoft in the Summer of 2008.