Hey There!

I'm Dylan, a passionate software engineer and avid learner with entrepreneurship at my core.

My blog posts:

2024-11Not All Problems Are Great Fits for LLMs
2024-116 Things I Would Improve About Dify.AI
2024-4I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on HTMX
2023-12I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on gRPC
2023-10I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on GitHub Copilot
2023-8I Reviewed 1,000s of Opinions on Serverless
2023-8I Reviewed 1,000s of GraphQL vs. REST perspectives

My proudest achievements:

2023
Wrote technical articles that reached the front page of Hacker News [Hacker News Thread]
2023
Sold three different software products to real recurring customers in the same year
2022
Started a Company to Sell SDKs, Documentation, and Demos as a Service for API-First Companies [Customer Case Study]
2022
Interviewed at YCombinator as a solo founder
2022
Quit my job to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams
2020
Promoted to Senior Software Engineer only 9 months after starting my first job out of college at C3.ai
2019
Built and launched a Shopify app in a week that had revenue on day 1 of launch
2019
Graduated with a B.S. and M.Eng. in Computer Engineering from UIUC in four years
2019
Received 4 software engineering job offers from Benchling, Facebook, AppDynamics, and C3.ai before graduating
2019
Created a robotic caricature artist for Senior Design [Demo Video] [Presentation] [Final Paper]
2018
Authored a research paper as an undergraduate at UIUC [Paper]
2017
Won a game of HQ Trivia using classical NLP techniques (pre-LLM era) [Blog Post]
2016
Built a website with over 210,000 users, which required me to dodge IP range blocks from Niantic [Reddit Launch Thread]
2016
Won an Intel-sponsored prize at Hack Illinois

What colleagues have said about me:

I have no hesitation in saying that Dylan exhibited exceptional drive, competency and leadership abilities. I wholeheartedly recommend him and would welcome the opportunity to work together again. Dylan would be a great asset for any organization!
— Cherif Jazra

With organizational growth and new projects, it was an easy decision for me to make Dylan the technical lead for a new engineering team in my org, working on a greenfield project at the intersection of data infrastructure and machine learning...I would without a doubt work again with Dylan, and would highly recommend him to anyone looking for a highly skilled engineering leader!
— Manas Talukdar