About

I was born and raised in Burbank, California to Roman-Catholic immigrant parents. Grew up playing StarCraft and World of Warcraft, reading, and watching a lot of movies. Discovered Linux at 14, watched Hackers-1995 soon thereafter, and the rest is history. I went to the University of Utah and got my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. While I was there, I did grant-funded research for the FLUXResearch Group in the areas of Systems and Security, mostly focusing on Fuzzers, including static analysis for fuzzing campaigns, fuzzing WASM runtimes, and distributed compute applied to fuzzing. I wrote my Thesison a new distributed Fuzzer architecture called Hopperunder the guidance of Professor Robert Ricci.

I've been working in industry since I was 18, during my undergrad I worked at a few startups including Blerp and Solo. I also did Software Engineering internships at Goldman Sachs in their SPARC Automation team and at Amazon on the AWS EC2 Security Trust Infrastructure team. Most of my work in industry has focused on building infrastructure and scalable systems. Currently, I'm working on distributed network infrastructure at Palantir Technologies.

Goal:

I enjoy working with curious people, driven to create the future of technology. I strive to be better every day and look for people who share that drive.

Blogs

I update my blog as much as my free time will alow me, and I treat my blogs as a candid place to express ideas. Basically just a brain dump of what I'm thinking at the time, and occasionally I'll write a high effort post.

All opinions expressed are my own, and no one elses (including, but especially my employer). If I have anything new going on I'll probably put it in the home page (like a new blog post). Otherwise, besides from my blog posts I might also post new tech and tools I'm using in recommendations from time to time.

Here are some stats on my blog posts:

Genesux

By the time I was 14, I was using IRC. But it all started when I was 12, I was entranced by online game forums, which would sometimes bring up the topics of game design and development, slowly leading me to the question of "How does a computer run my game?". I found myself eagerly curious as to how we made computers enact our human vision, a curiosity I still have today.

Eventually I started using Linux after a user in a Debian IRC gleefully mentioned a new release for an Operating System that was "revolutionary", it had all this exciting new software to make the linux desktop better, a web engine library called Oxide. Knowing nothing about these arcane technologies, I asked if he could show me how to install this "Ubuntu" thing. For the next 4 hours he proceeded to show me the Ubuntu install page and walked me through how to dual-boot it on my old Dell desktop family computer, as well as showing me how to use the apt package manager. At the 4 hour mark, my father barged in, immediately bewildered by the orange background and goat-like animal on the family desktop, recognizing that this wasn't the same desktop he saw that morning, quickly rushed to the keyboard while telling me I had installed a virus. After careful mitigation, rebooting to windows, and reassuring him that it wasn't a virus, I had successfuly averted a disasterous beating. I had installed Ubuntu 14.04 - Trusty Tahr, somehow not discouraged by merely dodging a beating, I quickly rebooted back to Ubuntu and began to explore this new orange world. The logo looked cool, a small trivial observation that intruiged my 14 year old impressionable mind, I clicked through all the apps, and found my way to terminal. And that's the story of how a helpful Ubuntu evangelist, a web engine library, and an orange Tahr came together to influence my career choice.

Ever Since then I've been using Linux as my main Operating System, only switching back to windows (dualboot or virt) to game. Fast forward a couple years, I like the flexability and the freedom of customizability that linux has. This is what my linux journey looked like:

Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch -> Manjaro -> Gentoo -> Void -> Arch -> Debian.

Yes, although briefly, I used Gentoo and it was a pain to use. Thankfully it was only over part of a summer. So it's fair to say I've had a taste of the linux ecosystem. But now we arrive at my current system:

I don't use a desktop environment, I prefer to use a heavily riced window manager called awesome (AWM). I also use urxvt as my terminal, mostly becuase I hate bloated terminals, and urxvt is small, performant, and best of all - highly customizable. I try to use (as much as I can) suckless software, as the design ethos makes sense. I try to keep my system lean, however I do like to test new tools frequently so I end up collecting junk I don't use. If Nix gets better docs I might switch, but otherwise I like my Debian unstable setup.

This Site:

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Socials

Twitch:

You might find me streaming on Twitch. Usually side projects, occasionally Advent of Code.

Twitter:

I tweet about whatever project I'm working on at the time. After the Twitter acquisition, I've been more active on Twitter. Not sure if I actually enjoy it or I'm just curious when it's all gonna fall apart.

Mastodon:

I have a mastodon account on discuss.systems, usually the same kind of posts as my twitter: https://discuss.systems/@lremes