Myk's Digital Garden

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Myk's Digital Garden

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

☎️phone⁠

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website⁠

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🖨️ PDF

Mykola Bilokonsky - Resume - August 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 worked on the full stack, but my FE is rusty. I’m particularly good at navigating communication between people who have different ways of thinking - my side work as a neurodiversity coach is actually excellent ancillary experience for engineering management. I have a broad range of domain experience from configuring hadoop clusters to designing and implementing binary protocols - I can think both big picture and small picture, and shift my focus as is appropriate. And I’m deeply experienced with the current state of the LLM ecosystem, and have built some cool tools in this space.

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 draw 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:

If you've got the opportunity to collaborate with Myk, you should take it. Myk is a rare combination of extremely thoughtful and highly intelligent. He's able to think outside of the box while also staying grounded in the realities of business and the needs of coworkers and customers.

Myk's depth of knowledge is an asset to any project.

Joel Hooks, President, egghead.io

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

I’ve worked many jobs over the years, the below is a limited sample. Additional history back to 2008 available upon request.

Egghead.io

LLM R&D / February 2024-July 2024

Joel Hooks at

Egghead.io⁠

hired me to help him reason about how to best integrate LLM flows into some products he was working on in ways that added genuine value, avoided generating slop and were specifically intended for human-in-the-loop flows.

The result was

nerds.ai⁠

, a library of prototypes that expose a variety of powerful tools. Nerds are designed to be easy to define and deploy. They specify types for both input and output, and provide an intuitive way to compose them because each Nerd can be run as a standalone agent or can be packaged up as a tool and invoked by other nerds. They’re LLM agnostic, meaning you can bind the same nerd to Claude or GPT or Gemini and it’ll just work. And they have some powerful examples, including a flow that populates a knowledge graph using a vector store as an index and generates source documents for complex RAG operations that preserve links to source materials for every claim made. This is a great way to interact with large bodies of work in a way that augments human workflows and serves as a sort of conversational index into a larger space.

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

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.

We synthesized internal documentation from five different document tools into a single coherent source of truth, and successfully got folks to maintain it.

We created a monitored slack channel for developer support and successfully initiated a cultural shift across the company to consolidate internal support there.

We 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.

I navigated a number of complex issues on the team, including disability, interpersonal conflict and the specific career development goals of my various reports.

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

RhizomeDB⁠

) 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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