It's been a tough few months. How are you doing?
I believe
land use is the most important problem facing humanity in the
near-term future.
Half of all North American cities are insolvent; we do not build
anywhere near fast enough to support our economies.
At
Arterial, we've developed a platform that lets planners
build sites without needing to spend time on
legislative red tape.
Hundreds of the largest development corporations and cities on the
East Coast use us every day.
On the side, I study systems engineering and compilers at the
University of Waterloo.
Here's a selection of some of my favourite writings:
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Here's a (massively abbreviated) list of things I've built over the
years:
The
Zephyr was
a 10-day hackathon that took place onboard a set of trains and buses
across the continental United States.
We took 42 hackers on a 3500 mile-long journey from Hack Club HQ in
Vermont to SpaceX in Los Angeles; together, we built 623 projects -
from a set of search enginers to ML papers to photo galleries.
I was the technical organizer of the trip; we built a custom
deployment system on top of 150 Unifi routers across our 3 rented
train cars, and used ProxMox for project orchestration—given that
there wasn't any Internet for most of the trip, we wanted to make our
own.
The Zephyr set the standard for what joy and community could look like
in my life; nearly 4 years on, our group chats are still active. See
the documentary on
YouTube!
Idyllic is a programming language
for writing performant web services.
It performs up to 2.5x better than an equivalent Express app on
average, using 1.5x less boilerplate in example benchmarks, and ships
with a CLI and two compiler components. Idyllic also hit the front
page of r/ProgrammingLanguages on launch!
Socratica is a
dedicated place to work on the thing closest to your heart. Every
week, we bring ~100 people together to work on side projects. Every
year, we host a mind-blowing
Symposium.
This is absolutely the most incredible set of people I've ever been
able to work with. We've had people spin out companies (including
me!), learn to knit, break into research, and start their music
careers at sessions - all in the same week!
We started at Waterloo in 2022, and now 30+ independent nodes exist
worldwide. Check out our
photo album
as proof that the kids will be okay.
Legist is a web platform that allows users to digest government policy efficiently.
Legist uses near-shot categorization to sort articles and papers, BERT
to identify entities in text and create a public data graph from
government sources, and summarization using DistilBART, all served on
top of BentoML.
Dear visitor,
Hello there.
It's so nice to finally meet you.
I'm
Rishi.
I hack.
believe that the world can be made better in turning tacit problems
into bit-based ones.
Arterial takes up most of my time today: land
development is one of the biggest
levers for progress
available to us. Our tools for developers and planners have halved the
building timelines across thousands of projects.
~ If you are an infrastructure, compiler or ML nerd, email
rishi@arterial.design
with your favourite project for the most interesting employment
opportunity of your life.
In past lives, I wrote code and organized for other tinkerers:
I'm particularly proud of my work with
Socratica,
Idyllic, and
the Hacker Zephyr. In high school, I raised $1.8M for
Otto. You can find other shenanigans on my
GitHub
and sometimes
on the news.
You can find me at
@rishiosaur
on the rest of the Internet.
I'm quite active on
GitHub; you can see
a past version of me on
Twitter. My email
is
rishi@arterial.design, which is the best place to reach me.