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Myk's Digital Garden
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Myk's Digital Garden

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Ethical Technologist

Let's Work Together to Make the World Better, but Actually Tho?
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Hi, I’m Myk.

I live in Columbus, Ohio and I both write code and manage engineers for a living. If you’d like me to write code for you, or to manage your engineers, you should know that I only work remotely and that I care a lot about the values of the organizations I work with.
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✉️email
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☎️phone
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📯twitter
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website
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🖨️ PDF
Bilokonsky - Resume - 2024.pdf
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The Details

Tech Chops: JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Java, Some Elixir, some Go, Shell Scripting, NPM, Docker
Special Skills: I’ve spent the bulk of the past year learning a powerful set of skills with collaborative AI tools like GPT, and am able to use it to generate behaviors impossible with traditional code. I can train custom chatbots, generate incredible visuals and design powerful new abstract tools. For instance, this is an
example
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of what a project I’m calling Narrative Calculus can do.
Most Complex Project: A post-modern database that tracked changes instead of state using Delta CRDTs which we’d address with the IDs of the objects they referenced and then cache independently in buckets so that we could roll them into state at query time. I worked on everything from our binary format to our web interface to our Hadoop configuration, and as a result feel comfortable working in most parts of the stack.
Biggest Achievement: Hiring a team of three neurodivergent weirdos and harnessing all of that energy to improve my company’s infrastructure and developer experience. Managing is just like programming at a higher order of abstraction — your reports are essentially threads you spin off, as long as you maintain them, and it becomes a game of orchestration rather than direct implementation. I love it!
Weirdest Bug: We had a test that failed about once every 65,000 times it ran. We realized we had improperly implemented the short numeric type in our binary decoder, so every time its value randomly came up as 0 it was parsed as a place to inject a template value instead of the value 0.
Driving Force: Curiosity and a desire to help people. I’m happy if I’m learning something new or if the thing I’m working on is going to delight someone else. Preferably both!
Skills:
Advanced, up-to-date familiarity with the AI-based software ecosystem.
Rapidly building nuanced, relational understanding of complex systems.
Learning and understanding new programming languages and tech paradigms.
Effective communication with stakeholders, both technical and nontechnical.
Management and hiring, with specific experience with Disabled and Neurodivergent reports.
Identifying problems before they become problems.
Learning from my mistakes.
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References and Reviews

My current references are always available upon request, I can provide folks from many contexts — let me know what would be ideal.
Here are some nice things I’ve managed to get past colleagues to say about me:
I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I had to work with Myk. He is easily one of the most kind, compassionate and empathetic managers I have ever worked with. He deeply cares about his team and their success - both professionally and personally. He is thoughtful and truly listens to others problems, issues and takes time to fully understand before jumping in to solve. It is rare to come across a leader who is so instinctively selfless and willing to do anything for his team. Myk taught me so much about managing and leading folks who may work differently than I do, and I’ve since had the opportunity to pass that training on to my peers. Myk will be an invaluable asset to any organization.
Cree Flory, colleague at Mode

Introducing Myk into our team gave us a much broader perspective on our codebases. He regularly pushed us to think one abstraction step further, and to consider all potential ramifications of our work. Keeping this up in a fast paced environment is no easy feat. This made him a great colleague, a solid engineer and a good person to spend time with.
Orta Therox, colleague at Artsy

Myk is a one-of-a-kind developer, technologist and human being. Skai was my first software development job, and I literally couldn't have asked for a better mentor than Myk. No only did he patiently walk me through the fundamentals of programming and web application architecture, but I learned every day from the example he set: carefully crafted code, clean and comprehensive unit tests, elegantly architected systems, and a deep-rooted kindness that permeates all his interactions. I feel incredibly lucky to have had a mentor like Myk.
Dan Baneman, colleague at Skai

Myk helped our team untangle a big thorny mess of a platform, and brought it to a stable, well-tested, and maintainable place. He's thorough, committed, and kind, and loves to talk about big ideas. Best of all, he cares deeply about the impact his work has on people, and his thoughtfulness carries through in everything he does.
Ben Haas, Software Engineering Manager, Intersection
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Select Work History

Additional history available upon request.

Consulting


Engineer for Hire / 2008-Present
I’ve done a lot of consulting work in my time, starting with Flash back in the dark ages and up through front-end and server-side work. I’ve worked on my own under several brands over the years; I’ve worked with partners, I’ve collaborated with agencies and I’ve done a lot of work on and off with the fine people at
TestDouble
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.
Most recently I’ve been consulting on LLM-related work, helping companies implement useful tools that mitigate the inbuilt biases while generating consistent value from the technologies available.

Mode Analytics


Senior Engineer, then Engineering Manager / March 2020-September 2022
After a few years as an IC at Mode my contributions beyond my immediate job requirements were noted and appreciated. Having done things like get our local dev environment running in Docker, I was asked to assemble and lead a Developer Experience team. I hired three excellent engineers and we have been making big improvements to our company ever since. We standardized onboarding to take a day instead of a week, created a monitored slack channel for developer support, kicked off an ongoing effort to improve unit test coverage and shipped an internal CLI tool that standardized, streamlined and measured the performance of various common tasks.

Skai


Tech Lead / 2011-2014
Skai was an incredible roller coaster of a startup experience. We developed genuinely amazing technology (a fragment of which I’m attempting to recapture with
VerbDB
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) while working hard at every part of the stack — literally, I designed the binary protocol and compression algorithms to optimize our data model for our use case; I designed and implemented a web-based REPL to interact with our system; I set up and configured our Hadoop/HBase systems; and I mentored a few junior engineers along the way. We ultimately passed all of the acceptance criteria to land a huge contract at a Fortune 10 company before their leadership changed and shut down the project, and our company didn’t last much longer after that.
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Projects

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egghead.io
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coda.io
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VerbDB
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Essays

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coda.io
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gist.github.com
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coda.io
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Talks

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Things Every Software Engineer Should Know About Neurodiversity
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Have You Ever, Like, Really Thought About Functions?
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Trees vs Forests: Ontology and Taxonomy
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