University of Southern California

R&D at AUGMXNT

Building and deploying leading-edge multilingual and multimodal AI models

Shisa.AI

Founder, CTO

Meterbolic

Advisory Board

AKA Virtual

Systems Architect, Emerging Technology

Personal Applied Research Lab (things Leonard finds interesting)
* Generative AI (SD, LLMs)
* Crypto (DeFi, NFTs, DAOs)
* Personal Knowledge Management
* QS and Metabolic Health Research
* VR/XR
* Personal Automation
* Sustainable Tech
* Human Coordination Problem

AUGMXNT

Code for America

Board of Directors

Working to bridge the gap between Web 2.0 professionals and Municipal IT.

Acting CTO

SCHED*

Partner

Building the world's most advanced automated portraiture machines.

* Built a profitable-from-the-start, boot-strapped small-business w/ consistent $1M+ annual revenue
* Wrote 10K's of lines of PHP, Python, Objective C, Quartz Composer,  OpenFrameworks C++, HTML5 Javascript, Android Java across the entire stack from AWS servers, to embedded microcontrollers, to 100ft+ LED walls on ridiculously tight deadlines and into a (mostly) integrated platform
* Managing various contractors/contributors for development against extremely tight, hard deadlines
* Lots of crazy hardware work - custom fabrication of wood, glass, steel, PCBs. Integration of all kinds of camera, video, power systems
* Delivery/execution (involving literal tons of hardware) around the world, from Paris to Shanghai, 787 First Delivery to the Super Bowl, to cruise ships in the middle of the Caribbean in a tropical storm

Lensley

Curverider

Board of Advisors

Working on scaling, performance and general development on  BarackObama.com

* Overall performance and scaling analysis, recommendations, and development leading up to the election
* Intense site-wide DB query review/analysis/optimizations - notably, one fix resulted in 100,000X performance improvement, going from something that was crashing the site daily to using less than 1% load.
* Introduced geo-optimization techniques (space-filling curves, etc) and other optimizations used site-wide (and NN/GOTV systems)
* Built new worker/task/queue system over the course of 6 weeks to replace multiple existing systems, including processing of all donations during the general election (~$500M processed)
* Built new events system used for all public events, which included handling of repeating/multi-segment events, with best-in-class event SERPs, discovery 
* Ran some special teams/experiments/hacks, general tomfoolery

Blue State Digital

Developer

Among other things:

* Development and deployment of Shopify-based e-commerce site and associated front-end site and back-office fulfillment/workflow integration.
* PoC design and development of architecture for searchable databases/mobile-client sync for multi-million user system.
* Contracted to review deployment of distributed KV storage system (Voldemort on AWS) for use as canonical storage for 1B+ items. After being unable to create test instance that could meet QPS targets, over the course of a weekend, reviewed/created test instances of all extant distributed keystores. Unfortunately, none met requirements, and ended up writing my own version over the course of a couple days. Apparently, worked relatively well for 4+ years before it was finally retired. Published a widely referenced public writeup on the experience.
* Various scaling projects, including assisting scaling for one of (if not the) largest production Solr clusters, MySQL replication/performance/scaling analysis and optimization

Self-employed

Freelance Hacker

Fixing things. Built and maintained many internal tools used by thousands of Yahoos. Tried to make things better.

Yahoo! Inc

Hacker

I ran Hack, Yahoo!'s internal innovation program, which was responsible for organizing global Hack Day hackathons, as well as interfacing with units across the company to adapt Hack Days to their orgs and to assist in moving hacks into the product development pipeline. Additionally, we developed tools and process to feed projects into the Brickhouse incubator.

Hackmeister (Director of Hack)

Co-founded and worked on Upcoming.org. Scaling for multi-million users, worked on events and location platform for all of Yahoo! including integration with existing platforms and building performant, redudant systems for display in Yahoo! Search results.

Senior Technical Yahoo

Supported fund-raising, budgets, operational advice - non-profity board stuff over the course of a few years.

Machine Project

Worked w/ Andy and Gordon to make the first social events website.  Started as a part-time project and ended up as a Yahoo! acquisition. Patents on the first news feed among other silly things.

Upcoming.org

Co-Founder

Worked on campus-wide web projects including redesign of the main site, launching the student portal, working on campus-wide wiki/blogging, and rolling out Internet2 middleware/federated auth, etc. etc.

Web Programmer / Analyst

Worked as systems architect, web expert for a leading local Multimedia consultancy.   Tech lead for two medium scale engagements including a vertical market portal (hey, it was the bubble, what can I say).

Leonard Lin