Tyler Spaeth

I have: • Developed a core engine for a drawing application from scratch. • Migrated an app from iOS 6's traditional UI to iOS 7's flat UI. • Maintained a suite of iOS apps. • Built an iOS app from the ground up.

I've worked on many backends for many websites ranging from websites with millions of users running Django REST framework to smaller sites relying on Flask. I use Python as my go to scripting language and for project prototypes.

I've grown up with assembly language and have been working with it for the past 28 years starting around 12. My experience includes reverse engineering, using in circuit emulators to modify running program behavior on the fly, and using Intel's AVX2 vector extensions to increase the performance of compute intensive floating point code by a factor of 5. My crowning achievement was getting Asheron's Call running on my friend's Cyrix 686, which didn't implement Intel's RDTSC instruction, which Asheron's Call used. I set up a SoftICE macro that would trap the illegal instruction handler and replace the offending RDTSC instruction with two no operation instructions and resume execution. It worked like a charm, and we reused it for Diablo II :-)

I've used OpenMP, OpenMPI, and AVX (Intel's advanced vector extensions) to run code on HPC (High Performance Computing) clusters, including a physics simulation and a program to check for recurring patterns of primes centered around the Collatz conjecture. I understand low level computer architecture and network systems well and can track and balance the performance characteristics of HPC code.

I majored in computer science at the University of California Santa Cruz but learned much of what I know independently. I'm a big fan of algorithms and data structures. I've implemented many uncommon algorithms and structures in prototype form which makes it easier to explain the essentials without adding unnecessary complexity. My two current favorites include splay trees and cuckoo hashing, though both have significant draw backs. Splay trees are great but can experience pathological behavior and cuckoo hashing generally has lower performance than linear probing. But both are very clever and fun (for some definition of fun :-)).