About
I graduated in May 2023 with a B.S. in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology, and I am currently working as a software engineer in Corning's Advanced Optics division.
We create precision optical solutions that support the semiconductor, aerospace, and defense industries. It's very cool, and the fact that these optical systems modulate light with nanometer-level precision still does not feel real to me.
I like learning how computers and software work at every level, from low-level details up through full applications.
I enjoy building tools, experimenting with ideas, and improving my skills over time. I am a strong believer in self-education.
I am also particularly interested in effective pedagogy, which I believe is more important than ever in an era where more and more people are offloading their critical thinking skills to generative AI tools.
Experience
Personal Projects
These are software projects I am developing to explore various technologies and concepts. They are not monetized or "public-facing" in any way, save for a small demo in some circumstances.
- Ragtastic — My first foray into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Forgive the dumb name.
- Bloom — Self-study platform built upon effective pedagogy techniques like spaced recall, interleaving, and fine-grained knowledge graphs.
- More that I will eventually get around to sticking on GitHub...
Links
Contact
You can reach me at austin@austincepalia.com.
Things I find interesting
- Jon Skeet's reading of the C# 6 draft spec. I accidentallly fell asleep to this a few years ago. I would like to think I learned a thing or two about C# that night, but I can't be sure.
- Showstopper! chronicles the development of the NT kernel, lead by Dave Cutler.
- One of the craziest bugs I've ever heard of. It was a vulnerability in the macOS operating system that allowed anyone to gain root access by simply trying to log in with username "root" and a blank password a few times.
- Nick Craver's blog, which is a treasure trove of information about how Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network used to operate at a technical level. He has written about topics such as database architecture, caching strategies, load balancing, and performance optimization. It's fascinating how little hardware was required to support one of the most popular websites on the internet, at least before it was migrated to the cloud. It also spawned one of my favorite tools, Dapper.
- This discussion between Casey Muratori (Handmade Hero), avid opponent of object-oriented programming, and "Uncle Bob" Martin, author of the book on Clean Code. They never really reach much of a common ground, but that's not surprising considering one discusses writing performant game engine-level code in C and the other discusses writing maintainable enterprise software in Java, where maintainability, extensability, and time-to-delivery is king.
- My favorite Torvalds rant. Apparently someone bought a domain for it.
Why does this website look like it came from the 90's?
The answer:
I like software (and websites) that are fast, simple, and reliable. Simple HTML pages with minimal styling and no JavaScript are predictable across browsers, scale well to different screen sizes, and load quickly even on slow connections. They are also accessible for screen readers and other assistive technologies.
Of course, I could make this site look a little nicer and just optimize it by compressing images, bundling resources into single files, etc., but there are so many other projects I'd rather be working on right now.
Even as I type this, VS Code autocomplete is suggesting I talk about how I plan to improve it with fancy JavaScript frameworks. But who has the time for that?
(I also like plaintext email, but I'm not a card-carrying member of that cult yet...)
The actual answer:
My first exposure to "coding" (I hate that word) was as an 8 year old in 2007, watching YouTube on a Compaq Presario CQ50 and writing markup in Notepad++.
I was mesmerized by the fact that you could link a single stylesheet to multiple HTML documents and style them all at once.
Unfortunately, my interest in front-end web development basically ended there, and I have only occasionally dabbled in it since.