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 at 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. After graduation I joined Palantir on their Network Infrastructure team, working on distributed network infrastructure. Most of my work in industry has focused on building infrastructure and scalable systems. Currently, I'm building Command & Control Systems at Anduril Industries.

Will:

I aim to bring about the transhumanist Utopia I grew up reading about, to aim for anything lower would be blasphemous and deprive humanity of greatness. I believe in the beauty of the Western Canon, the fragile brilliance of our Democracy, and the indomitable human spirit. Democracies maximize individual liberties and freedom better than any other system of rule while remaining robust to corruption. Thus, my transhumanist Utopia presupposes a stable Democracy. Therefore I do what I do.

Blogs

I update my blog as often as time allows, and I treat it as a candid space to jot down ideas. A brain dump of whatever I’m thinking about, with the occasional high-effort post mixed in. Nothing here is original, I am simply an amalgamator of experiences and readings, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The only thing original about me are my mistakes.

All opinions here are my own - not anyone else’s (including, and especially, my employer).

If I’ve got something new going on, I’ll usually put it on the home page (like when I publish a fresh post). Otherwise, aside from blogs, I sometimes share the latest tech or tools I’m using in recommendations.

Genesux

By the time I was 14, I was using IRC. But it all started earlier, when I was 12, entranced by game forums discussing game design and development, slowly leading me to wonder: how does a computer actually run my game?. That curiosity for distilling a human vision into a machine has stuck with me ever since.

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 four-hour mark, my father barged in - immediately bewildered by the orange background and goat-like mascot on the desktop. Recognizing that this wasn’t the same machine he’d left that morning, he rushed to the keyboard, insisting I had installed a virus. After some careful mitigation, a reboot back into Windows, and a lot of reassurance, I narrowly dodged a disastrous beating. Still, I had done it: Ubuntu 14.04, Trusty Tahr was installed. And somehow, instead of being discouraged, I was fascinated. The logo looked cool, the apps were new, and the terminal was waiting. A helpful evangelist, a web engine library, and an orange Tahr had just set me on the path to my career. I had just been nerd sniped for the first time in my life

Ever since then, Linux has been my main operating system, with occasional detours into windows (dualboot or virt) to game. These have been my wanderings through the ecosystem:

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

Yes, I even tried Gentoo - briefly one summer - and yes, it was as painful as everyone says. But it gave me a taste of the grungier parts of the community. Which brings us to my current system:

I don't use a desktop environment, I instead run a heavily riced window manager called awesome (AWM). My terminal of choice is urxvt , mostly because I hate bloated terminals, and urxvt is small, performant, and best of all - highly customizable.

Where possible, I stick to suckless, as the design ethos makes sense. I try to keep my system lean, but I also like experimenting with new tools… which means I inevitably collect a fair amount of junk I don’t use. I run Nix Darwin on my personal laptop, but have found it hard to use at times. If it ever gets better documentation, I might switch — but for now, I’m happy running Debian unstable as my dekstop OS.

This Site:

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Socials

Twitch:

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

Twitter:

I have a twitter, but recently I've found it unusable. Occasionally there's high quality content on there and I'll engage.

Mastodon:

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