I was lucky to start learning to write software at a young age. I turned that interest into a successful career in distributed systems. Recently I've refocused my energy on personal projects, sometimes related to software, sometimes not. Below is something of a résumé recounting employers and projects.
Employment
Independent Artist; Northwoods, WI — Jan. 2020 - present
Woodworker
Self-published project plans.
Toboggan, Mailbox, Adirondack Chairs, Electric guitar, Gentleman's chest, others…
Motorcyclist / Traveler / Videographer
Software Engineer
Musician
Composed and recorded “Quaranteam”
Staff Engineer, VMware, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA — Jun. 2015 - Jan. 2020
Founding engineer of the Blockchain team
Implemented Ethereum-compatible blockchain on top of Concord-BFT, an implementation of the SBFT consensus algorithm.
Patent: Fink et al. Providing Real-World Time in a Replicated State-Machine Environment. 2022. US Patent Number: 11,502,858.
Member of the Virtual SAN team, focused on Distributed Object Manager
Cowrote vSAN: Modern Distributed Storage, published in ACM SIGOPS OSR
Collaborated with research team to improve consensus algorithm (presented at RADIO 2017)
Improved congestion tracking
Hosted "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" BoF at RADIO 2016
Patent: Wang et al. Multi-Tenant Encryption on Distributed Storage Having Deduplication and Compression Capability. 2020. US Patent Number: 10,666,435.
Patent: Wang et al. End-to-End Checksum in a Multi-Tenant Encryption Storage System. 2020. US Patent Number: 10,581,602.
Senior Software Developer, Apple Inc.; Cupertino, CA — Dec. 2013 - May 2015
Member of the iCloud team, focused on CloudKit
Responsible for subscription and push notification infrastructure
Various titles, Basho Technologies, Inc.; Cambridge, MA — Feb. 2008 - Dec. 2013
Principal Software Engineer
Designed and implemented usage tracking for Riak CS storage system
Presented Riak Pipe - Riak's Distributed Processing Framework at RICON 2012
Senior Software Engineer
Created Riak Pipe, distributed workflow system
Aided with plan and execution of new product release
Presented online seminar covering example Riak application (“wriaki”)
Engineering Manager
Led team of 5-9 software developers through several releases of Riak
Organized development of secondary product, Riak Search, including beta releases
Coordinated cooperation between development and support teams
Lead Engineer
Co-developed Riak, a completely decentralized, scalable, fault-tolerant key-value store
Presented Riak at developer conference (NoSQL NYC)
Created visual trace tool for debugging Webmachine resources
Software Developer
Co-developed Webmachine, a ReSTful web service toolkit in Erlang
Implemented web interfaces with many other sites (Salesforce.com, Hoovers, ThomsonReuters)
Designed and implemented web-based sales tools with team of developers
Software Developer, EventMonitor, Inc.; Boston, MA — Jan. 2006 - Jan. 2008
Created ACID-compliant, low-latency, redundant store for automated trading platform
Implemented remote-cluster monitoring system
Automated software release process
Improved NFS performance
Software Developer, Teradyne, Inc.; North Reading, MA — June 2004 - Jan. 2006
Maintained driver for widely-used parallel bus test instrument
Expanded bus abilities for serial bus test instrument
Debugged customer issues remotely and on-site
Improved build system resource sharing
Intern, EventMonitor, Inc.; Boston, MA — Jan. 2004 - June 2004
Created JNI interface to native linear algebra libraries
Benchmarked storage technologies
Intern, DaimlerChrysler, AG; Berlin, Germany — June 2003 - Aug. 2003
Created JNI interface to CAN-networking equipment connecting automotive instruments to software simulations
Intern, Ping Ping Chai; Cambridge, MA — Jan. 2003 - May 2003
Created touchscreen-based GUI for networked jukebox system
Undergraduate Researcher, MIT; Cambridge, MA — Sep. 2001 - Dec. 2003
Applied SVN AI algorithms to extract artist “fingerprint” for automated musician recognition system
Implemented “round robin” thread scheduler for FLEX Realtime Java-to-C compiler
Created storage backend for community knowledge sharing system
Intern, Lucent Technologies; Murray Hill, NJ — Summers 1997-99
Created sample applications for the Softswitch project
Maintained code for experimental interface web application.
Publications
Fink, Knauft, Zhang, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - Special Topics archive, Volume 51 Issue 1, August 2017, Pages 33-37
Fink, Erlang '12 Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Erlang workshop, Pages 43-50
Presentations
Helium, IoT, and Home Brewing; Mar. 29, 2017
Helium On Air, live web stream
Less Ado about NTP; Dec. 13, 2016
Systems We Love, San Francisco, CA (original link)
Much Ado about NTP; Oct. 13, 2016
Papers We Love Too, San Francisco, CA
Fluctuations of Hi-Hat Timing and Dynamics in a Virtuoso Drum Track of a Popular Music Recording; Jan. 21, 2016
Papers We Love Too, San Francisco, CA
Building RiakCS on Riak; Jun. 14, 2013
Erlang User Conference, Stockholm, Sweden
Riak Pipe: Distributing the Load; Jun. 14, 2013
Erlang User Conference, Stockholm, Sweden
Distributed Computation on Dynamo-style Distributed Storage: Riak Pipe; Sep. 14, 2012
Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop, Copenhagen, Denmark
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA — B.S., 2004
Major: Computer Science and Engineering
AUP: “Solitaire Game Description Language: A study in task-specific programming language design”
Personal Projects
Symbology; https://symbology.app/ — Oct. 2015 - Present
Developed interactive puzzle game
Originally written in Swift, using SpriteKit
Recently rewritten in Javascript, SVG, and CSS
BeerRiot; Feb. 2007 - Jun. 2013
Developed website to make user-specific recommendations, based on ratings of other products
Experimented with frontends (ErlyWeb, Webmachine, jQuery) and backends (MySQL, Mnesia, Riak)
Integrated with Solr for text search; Google Maps for brewery plotting
Created Facebook library for Erlang, implemented Facebook application
Activities
Trustee and Chapter Advisor for Xi Chapter, Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity, 2005 – 2009