Hacking and engineering stuff for 10+ years. I care about effective impact, tech and pixels.
Soof Golan
Karma: 138
Dropout Application
I dropped out of a BSc degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering after 3 years. This was a pivotal moment in my career, this move also pushed me into leaving Apple, and taking the tech lead role of a startup where I upskilled myself in more areas than I care to count.
Knowing what I know today, I might have taken different paths and dropped out even earlier, but hindsight is 20⁄20.
That being said, I do not have regrets over most of the courses I have taken, what I learned there is still beneficial in my professional life today.
Now I’m offering my engineering skills to EA aligned orgs, and looking into AI Safety.
I would include all US patent information
Nice! (fwiw I’d probably aim to keep all of them and not filter)
So far as the computers, digital content and software are concerned… this may not remain usable
We can discuss on better solutions here, though this will be a premature optimization. I’d be perfectly happy if figured we’d need to “refresh digital hardware” every 20 years or so. This seems cheaper and easier than improving SSD technology to reach an MTBF of a few centuries.
Broadly speaking I would favor print media for this reason.
The intention is to do both, and optimistically the digital media survives and the situation will be vastly more positive than print only.
Paragraph 1:
Yeah, saving humanity from [near] extinction is my Plan A.
Paragraph 2+3+4:
I don’t know how to change humanity’s direction.
Do you think this disqualifies the project?
Following anonymous feedback that I got from this form (thank you!) here’s my more professional (and meme-less) pitch:
I’m offering my engineering / consulting time for free for a limited time for EA Aligned projects.
TL;DR
Book this calendly if you believe I might be a good fit to your challenges.
I’m offering help with
Software engineering
Data science
Exploration of new ideas and testing their tractability
Performance issues
Mentoring
Consulting
Experience:
I’ve been a professional engineer for 9+ years.
Some recent examples:
I was the tech lead of an autonomous drone startup, we created drones that intercept other drones, this included machine learning, tracking algorithms, computer vision, distributed low latency messaging, creating our own custom electronics and hardware.
I owned a critical silicon development framework at Apple and 1000x Improved its performance. My work had to do with computer vision and image processing IP development.
I joined Connected Papers to help them fix performance bottlenecks they’ve been having. I onboarded to their codebase in less than an hour, and 20x improved their most painful bottleneck.
I have reverse engineered undocumented APIs, dealt with authentication challenges and improved backend error resilience for Wix’s no-code app builder. This was part of automating the manual labor of managing mobile apps’ lifecycle in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
I’ve mentored and assisted engineers and to advance their skills and career. Mostly close friends but also from through a mentoring program.
For more thing, you can look at my CV and my LinkedIn and also my blog (which is updated infrequently).
How will working with me be like?
We’ll do a first meeting over video to talk about your challenges and figure out if I can help you.
An optional onboarding session to your codebase.
Async messaging as day-to-day synchronization (more video calls optional)
I deliver whatever we’ve established needs to be done.
Direct Communication- I express my opinions about engineering in a very frank way, I do this in a constructive way in order to find solutions to the problems we have at hand. I hope to work with people who are happy with this communication style.
Should you contact me?
If you think I might be helpful to you—yes.
If not—please provide feedback on you you think is missing right here.
I might be interested :)
Would you like to schedule a meeting and talk about the challenges you’re facing?
This actually happened to me as well!
Both parties agreed the meeting’s goals were accomplished and we continued with our EAG