Neil’s Notes and Thoughts

Hello

I am Neil and I make software and other things. I am currently living and working in New York. My tools include Python, Erlang, C and JavaScript. Here are a few of my recent roles:

  • Engineering leadership at Roblox, focusing on Safety at scale.
  • Founding engineer at June Life, building June's cloud platform and infrastructure, and ecommerce systems.
  • Early engineer and technical lead at Uber, building payments and other distributed systems.
  • Early engineer and technical lead at Path, building Path's group and direct messaging systems.

I can also be found on the following places on the web:

Recent Posts

Deciding When to Build or When to Buy
July 14, 2020

As an engineer or engineering leader building new solutions – this happens very frequently at startups – you often have to answer...

QuickChat and WebRTC
November 12, 2013

I have been working on a personal project called QuickChat for the last 3 weeks. A large part of the project uses WebRTC. It has...

Learning and using Erlang
May 15, 2013

Recently, I built an Erlang-based realtime messaging platform at work. This post goes into detail about Erlang’s strengths,...

Building a Realtime Messaging Platform with Erlang
April 21, 2013

Recently at work, we launched a realtime messaging feature. We used Erlang to build a central part of this feature's server...

A New Blog!
December 03, 2012

Recently, I decided to move a new blogging setup. Previously, I used a self-hosted Wordpress install, then a custom Django app, and...

Recent Projects

The following are a couple of personal projects I've worked on:

  • Annoted — A bookmarking and note-taking service with sharing features.
  • QuickChat — A high-quality web-based video-chat service using WebRTC.