my name is aspen smith and i'm a software engineer and musician.

work

i'm currently a software engineer at jane street, working on language, runtime, and library support for parallelism in oxcaml.

previously, i worked on database internals at readyset, an incrementally maintained, partially stateful materialized view maintenance system for sql that's wire-compatible with postgresql and mysql, based on noria.

prior to that, i worked in a series of small startups, mostly doing full-stack web development.

code

most of the (public) code i write these days is still on github

music

blog

i don't have any blog posts on this site yet, but some prospective titles for some i'd like to write someday:

  • what the perfect code review system looks like
  • why "fun" is a really effective compass for improving the world
  • you are actually fifteen crying babies in a trench coat
  • more people should practice clowning
  • reflections from ten years of working at startups
  • an interpreter value representation taxonomy (or: why nan-boxing isn't actually any good)

one thing you could do, if you were so inclined, is to reach out to me if one of those titles resonates with you or inspires curiosity. i'd love to be encouraged to actually write them!

contact