Hiya! I'm Max, a programmer by day, and uh... a slightly sillier programmer at night.
I'm an engineer that has long been passionate about simplicity in design - not simplicity in ideas. Elegance in code is not just something that I rant about at parties but a true goal that I strive for:
"Do One Thing And Do It Well" (DOTADIW)
Unlike the things I make, I - in fact - do many things. I studied mathematics, economics, and computer science at NYU and have gained work experience in data engineering and ML. My wide array of interests has proven itself useful in understanding how to effectively approach a problem and to design efficient solutions.
More specifc details about my experience can be found in my CV.
(last updated: 13 February 2024)my projects & other fun things
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Developed a blazingly fast, simple, and efficient alternative for enterprise message queues such as Kafka and SQS. Plumber Queue is a best-effort queue for smaller use cases where managing a full cluster is unnecessary.
Made an encoder/decoder crate for the RSV (rows of string values) format with specifications from Stenway. This crate includes support for Serde serialize/deserialize traits making it very generalizable and easy to use with custom structs.
Created suite for managing robust process pipelines. Follows all my favorite design philosophies for modular and simple implementations and came about as something that I actually needed at work at the time! Currently contains CLI tools for supervising pipelines and a custom Kafka client for easy integration with the toolkit.
This is the kafka cli counterpart to the project above (Plumber). The cli is an implementation of a console based consumer and producer in pure rust. It's very similar to kcat but was created to be slightly easier to use, more robust, and have better integration with Plumber.
Group project where we leveraged the public Yelp review dataset to research the feasibility of predicting restaurant closures based on historical review trends. Worked on much of the initial design and data preprocessing followed by lots of collaborative work on choosing models and optimizing. Experimented with using ChatGPT to parse sentiment as an additional feature in our dataset.
"The Matrix is everywhere. It's all around us". Be a little meta and come see how this very site was made and deployed! I like to think that while this project was very simple, it reflects many of my philosophies on how projects (even the easy ones) should be created and managed.
Had the goal of building a trading algorithm based off basic principles. Had very low exepctations of making any money off the markets but used it as a test of my understanding of statistical analysis. I met my expectations and wrote this paper instead of retiring.
A year long project founded and led by yours truly to create a service that would inform people about government changes. Was entirely focused on the technicals of the US government: the passage of bills, executive orders, and supreme court decisions. Had a small team with a researcher, writer, and developer.
Originally a school project written in C to learn basic threading, that I remade in Rust using all of its fancy bells and whistles. Nothing terribly amazing about this project but it was a nice introduction to low level memory manipulation (I learned what mmap was) and understanding of parallel programming.
The goal of this project was to create an easy to use trading strategy backtester built on top of Alex Golec's tda-api wrapper for TDAmeritrade's api (that no longer exists, sorry). Overall, this project never really interested me all too much and was left unused and undocumented. But hey, sometimes ideas deserve to be left in the dust.
My initial attempt at making a template for deploying fullstack applications. Uses docker and shell scripts to deploy a whole army of containers for front, backend, and redis cache for some reason. If you can't tell, I'm not proud of this one. It's getting a mention because it's my most starred project for some reason and I get to say docker. Docker docker docker.