Hello! I’m Wolf. I’m a senior CS student at Case Western and Bard HS Early College grad. I’m also a two time alum of Recurse Center an open ended NYC based programming retreat. Most recently I interned (and work part time) at Val Town, a “delightful serverless functions” platform. We make it easy to instantly ship a JavaScript function to the internet!

At Val Town, I’ve been focused on reworking our web editor to stream the full Deno language server, and am working on a rust/Pingora k8s load balancer; previously I wrote our CLI. At Recurse, I worked on an android-in-the-browser project streaming Nix-Docker Android containers over WebRTC, and on building this website. At Case, I recently completed the Veale Snyder fellowship,

At Case, I’m a member of the SEC allocations committee, where we audit and distribute funds to all umbrella organizations on Campus, am co-president of Linux club, and president of board game club. At Linux club I help give weekly talks about different lower level Linux-y topics — feel free to check out our “Syllabus” here!

I’m interested in creating complex, technically interesting developer tools. I love tinkering with frameworks and configuration, and am always learning new tools. I enjoy webdev because of how many different frameworks I get to learn and how widespread, powerful, and extensive the web is, but I also love systems and infra in general, and do crave touching packets from time to time :). I also love reproducibility and determinism; I’m particularly interested in Nix/NixOs, containerizing, networks, and DevOps. As much as I love learning and composing together tools, I also care deeply about how understanding how the tools I use work.

In general, I’m very meticulous and curious. I’ve had a variety of eclectic hobbies like fermenting yogurt and closet hydroponics, I love everything caffeine, and am also really into strategy board games and occasionally RPGs (my favorites are probably Inis, TI4, and Dead of Winter). I love taking notes (I’m a Obsidian geek), and care deeply about open-source and data centralization/monopolization and privacy. I fear of heavily relying on software day-to-day only to have it go down unexpectedly or stop in the future. I’m a Nix nerd, and love its guarantees and complex theory. I find it fascinating how generally useful it is, and its ergonomics. When I code, I aim for style as much as precision (I love monads!), and, I enjoy programming things that yes, are genuinely useful, but that are technically interesting and approach things in unique ways.

I began my coding journey in high school with a D&D character sheet tool and various automation scripts. My first major project started in my junior year: a Minecraft username sniping service that automatically claimed valuable usernames at the exact millisecond they became available, to resell through auctions. I got to learn OOP concepts with Python, async programming, and a bit about system deployments. My unique strategy was to automate spawning 80+ servers 2 minutes prior to names being released, and automatically setting them up and syncing them to have a perfect spread of offsets within 2 miliseconds of the drop time, so that I could minimize server costs. Though Mojang eventually changed their API, the experience confirmed that software development was the right path for me.

In 12th grade I set up a custom data-structures tutorial-course with another student and our CS professor, where I got to learn the basics of some CS concepts that I missed during my more informal project-based experiences. In the ‘course,’ since I and a peer were the first to undergo it, we worked to design a curriculum for us, but also for future students. Around the same time, I began working on a DNA-Nanotech design tool with my physics professor.

Integrating CS into a completely unfamiliar field was really fun and rewarding. I’d always been obsessed with learning tools. Via the project I was able to create a design tool of my own, which was something I’d always wanted to do, and towards the end of the year, I had a great experience attending the Nadrian Seeman Memorial at NYU, learning more about the field and its frontiers.

After high school, I dove deeper into web development during my first batch at Recurse Center. It was awesome to get to be around a community of technical tinkerers like myself, and I quickly spiraled down rabbit holes learning TypeScript, React, Next.js, and fullstack tools like Postgres and S3 while building my original personal website (which I rewrote in Astro a few years later). I rediscovered my love for tinkering with development tooling, similar to my earlier experiences with design software.

Now, at Case, I’ve been diving further into the weeds of CS through more formal courses. It has been very interesting to see what happens ‘under the hood,’ and to understand some of the actual implementation details of computer systems. Last year I took a Linux Scripting and Tools class, which has been amazing, and has completely changed my computer interaction trajectory; it’s turned me into a Linux geek. Learning about so many super cool hacky tools like vim, grep, and awk has been sublime. My favorite course at Case has been computer networks, where I was found myself totally obsessed with learning fun protocols.

During my first year, I dabbled with hardware, working on a robot that sorts coins by date. I received a student project grant from our campus makerspace and focused on CAD and building the robot with a Django backend for the Raspberry Pi. I also won my school’s hackathon with two friends, creating a project that uses a fine-tuned OpenAI model to scan campus events for free food.

I did another Recurse batch over freshman summer, since I had such an incredible experience during high school summer. I started by learning Nix, Nixos, and Bash/UNIX, and other fun more Linux-y technologies. I found Nix to be the coolest tool I’ve ever used, because of how it attempts to solve so many problems in such a fundamental, carefully thought out way. I think that many of the concepts of Nix are more important than ever now with AI. I also worked on a larger scoped project to get a fully featured android emulator to run with low latency in the browser, which is still very much a work in progress.

And that brings me to now! I’m super excited to continue learning and building cool things. If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to reach out!