Consulting
I do technical advising and freelance development for companies big and small.
Some recent examples:
- Part-time advising for a small startup, doing regular 1-on-1s with the CTO and selected ICs. Advised on technical architecture and team issues, and helped them hire a Head of Engineering and their first Staff Engineer.
- Worked with HCI pioneer Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and his research group to build a fully incremental processing pipeline for Asciidoc with Ohm.
- For a research group investigating parametric CAD/CAE systems, implemented a GPU-based interpreter (in Rust and WGSL) for rendering implicit surfaces.
For engineering projects, I’m especially interested in work where I can combine my deep systems expertise with frontend development and UX work.
My background
- Senior eng at Google (on Chrome & Android); Staff eng at Lyft building 3D viz tools.
- Engineering manager (and interim site lead) at Lyft Munich.
- Managed two teams at Sourcegraph (Frontend Platform, Dev Experience), helped build their engineering career ladder.
- Applied PL/UI research at Viewpoints Research Institute, Y Combinator Research, and Ink & Switch.
- 10+ years building and maintaining Ohm (⭐5.5k, 1.9M weekly downloads) and running the community.
- Co-author of WebAssembly from the Ground Up.
- 3 years working on multicore GC & memory management in the J9 Java VM.
How I can help
Fractional tech leadership
A common pattern at startups with ~5–15 engineers is leadership debt. Many companies of this size don’t yet have an engineering manager / head of engineering, and don’t have experienced, staff-level engineers. This often results in the CTO being stretched thin, as they try to cover both team-level execution issues and high-level technical guidance.
As an experienced engineering manager and a staff-level engineer myself, I can immediately help fill the gaps — advising on everything from technical architecture to lower-level issues like how to run planning meetings. I can do 1-on-1s with key ICs, to ensure they get the coaching and mentorship they need to keep the team running smoothly, freeing up the CTO / Head of Eng to focus on more strategic priorities.
Full-stack, 0-to-1 projects
I’m a generalist with both deep systems expertise and frontend/UX chops. Glen Murphy, formerly Head of Chrome and Android UX at Google, has said: “In addition to being an engineer extraordinaire, Patrick has an incredibly deep understanding of UX and contributes awesomeness everywhere in the stack.”
That combination makes me well-suited to quickly take new ideas from zero to one. Experiments, prototypes, or laying the foundations of a production system — I can quickly deliver end-to-end solutions that are technically sound and ready to put in front of users.
Language design & implementation
In my 10+ years of working on Ohm, I’ve both implemented a number of small compilers and interpreters, and advised/helped teams who are doing the same. I’ve also worked on a managed language runtime with industry-leading performance (J9 JVM). So if you’re designing a new language, or building an interpreter, compiler, etc. for a new one, I can help you make the right architectural decisions early.
Other things
- Developer tooling & experience: Experience building language tools, working on Chrome DevTools, and managing a DX team means I can help improve your internal tools and workflows.
- Technical hiring: I’ve hired and interviewed Staff+ engineers, and can help design interview processes or evaluate senior technical candidates.
- Performance: I’m experienced with performance tuning at the hardware level (branch prediction, memory hierarchies, etc.). I’ve also spent lots of time optimizing JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly code — so I can help with performance work at any level of the stack.
- Cleaning up messes: I enjoy diving into complex, unfamiliar code bases and making sense of things. I can help you tidy up messy, neglected code bases, and get them back on track.
If any of this sounds interesting, send me an email and let’s chat.
Testimonials
When Patrick started advising us, we were pre-beta, working through major technical challenges and had little structure in the engineering org. Patrick was an amazing influence on the entire team, and was critical in helping us architect some of the core foundational concepts in our platform while also helping create operational structure that helped us scale from Series A to B.
— Harsh Gupta, co-founder at Luminai