About Me
Huzband. Father of 2 — Atlas & Axis. Deoxyribonucleic acid meta-programmer.
The Hacker
I got into computers because I wanted to learn how to hack. I must have watched the movie Hackers one too many times.
I started programming at age 12 using Visual Basic to build hacking tools targeted at AOL. I also wrote programming articles for diskmag warez magazine called Reality Check Network (RCN).
In High School (Monte Vista in Danville, California), my friends and I were able to gain a rootshell on our computer network by exploiting a vuln in perl. After making some mistakes covering my tracks and misconfiguring the network, I knew I would be busted.
I decided to turn myself into my high school computer teacher, Rosanne Krane. I will forever be grateful to her for showing me mercy in my punishment. Instead of getting kicked out of school (the school principal’s preference), I was made a formal system admin and became the TA for the AP computer science class. I also had to serve detention and pick up trash after football games.
This marked a turning point in my career. I vowed never to be a Black Hat and to only use my skills for good.
The Dream Job
My dream job out of school (Masters in CS from UCSB) was to join Apple. I was a long time linux user (gentoo was my preferred flavor), but I was attracted to the glow of the Apple halo effect after experiencing the iPod (like many others).
My first was job at Apple was OS X Leopard build engineer. This gig consisted of turning a number of software cranks to turn 1000+ software projects (xnu, kexts libSystem, UIKit, Safari, everything) into a complied OS stack ready for distribution. The build system runs 24x7 on a distributed build machine cluster.
Soon after we shipped Leopard, I joined the Core Build Technologies team to work on the build system itself - XBS (X build system). And soon after that, I was running and building the build system for iOS (2.0 on the iPhone 3G).
Looking back, that was an amazing moment in time. I clearly remember Steve on stage unveiling the iPhone. I’m very thankful to have seen such an iconic visionary - Steve Jobs - in action.
Startup(s)
Working at Apple was a dream come true, but after having spent some time there, I started to have a new dream — to build a startup.
I got tired of building iOS and instead wanted to work as an independent developer using iOS frameworks directly. Tools like the iOS Simulator were mind blowing at the time.
I founded a series of startups with varying degrees of success and failure. Think Top Down to develop iOS games. Our first game — Friend Freak — turned the facebook social graph into an interactive quiz. It was featured on this “App Store turns 1” graphic.
We explored and developed a number of other apps.
Later I cofounded uApp to create a turn-key iOS mobile app generation system for specific verticals like music and online personalities.
After that, I decided to join Posterous (YC’08) and led the development of iOS and Android Apps. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012.
At Twitter, I worked on a number of projects:
- Quality filtering for notifications
- Quality filter evaluation tooling and process to measure recision/recall
- Feature switching to enable master sandbox for mobile development at scale (50+ devs)
- Profiles refresh for Android
- Pinned Tweet on iOS
- Twitter Mirror and Vine 360 event apps
- Media forward Tweets
- Photo filters
- Tweet composer refresh
- Increase rate limits for verified accounts across the product
- Twitter Cards
- Twitter for Retina iPad
- Mobile accessibility
- Developer dashboards
- Streamlined mobile development workflows
- Mobile Device Lab
- And other stuff I can’t remember now
Sabbatical
I’ve left Twitter at the end of 2015 - soon after my first son Atlas Huda was born to fully focus on Fatherhood and refresh my spirit.
I was severely burned out after a run at the startup game.
I spent my days reading books on the human biocomputer. I realized that I had spent so much time in the digital realm, that I hand’t invested enough time to learn more about my own biological hardware and software.
Crypto
I’m a firm proponent of decentralization, privacy, and bringing money back into the hands of the people.
I’m working at Supermassive building cryptocurrency trading tools to help more people achieve financial independence.
World Traveler
I incorporate travel into my lifestyle. I’d like to see everything before I retire, rather than retire then go see the world.
I love camping and I’m a fan of tiny teardrop trailers.
So far I’ve experienced:
United States
- California
- Arizona
- Oregon
- Washington
- Hawaii (Maui, Big Island. Kauai, Oahu)
- Florida
- Colorado
- Georgia
- Louisiana
- New York
- Illinois
- Texas
- Montana
- Idaho
- Wyoming
- Neveda
North America
- Mexico
- Canada
South America
- Peru
- Brazil
- Argentina
Central America
- Nicaragua
- Panama
Europe
- England
- Iceland
- France
- Italy
- Turkey
- Germany
- Poland
- Spain
- Greece
- Belgium
- Netherlands
- Czech Republic
Asia
- Thailand
- Japan
- Indonesia
Many more experiences to go!