I'm a software engineer who lives north of San Francisco. Founder of Dollero, a cryptocurrency remittance startup. Lambda School Fullstack Software Developer graduate. Part of the founding team of engineers at Nearside, where I spent the last 2.5+ years writing production code for new features, developing greenfield products, creating processes, documenting standards as we created them, releasing frontend and backend features.
Artist, endurance racing enthusiast, menacing Magic the Gathering player, and competitive Call of Duty team member.
I'm Frank, thanks for visiting!
It takes a villageTake ownership of your commitmentsOver communication > under communication
Part of the founding team at Nearside where I helped find product market fit for thousands of users.
3 month contract-to-hire, offered full-time in 1 month, promoted 3 times to Software Engineer L2.
Regularly reviewed and wrote customer facing production code with a 99% uptime committment.
Co-designed our incident response system that leveraged Alma, PagerDuty, Sentry, and DataDog.
Increased funded Business Bank Accounts by 2.5x in 3 months by optimizing the application funnel.
Owned Halo, a secure internal management dashboard that processed thousands of customers automatically and manually, used by 5 teams all with unique feature requirements.
After some success in the crypto space, I wanted to build something that would make a positive impact in the world. The opportunity to help people support their families abroad while working in the US, a transaction known as remittance, seemed obvious to me. Depending on how it's measured, the global remittance space is a several billion to trillion+ dollar market. The cost to customer of remittance varies depending on corridor, but a rough range is 10% - 40% per transaction.
Using a decentralized currency that runs through the internet and not through several layers of banks for remittance is one of the strongest use cases for cryptocurrency, IMHO. Customers win, the providers win, but the traditional banking industry could potentially lose one it's oldest cash cows.
Dollero's mission was to provide a remittance solution that abstracted all of the technical details from the UX and passed a bulk of the savings onto the customer. Behind the scenes it ran on Ripple's platform of inbound gateways, outbound gateways, and liquidity providers.
Graciously, Kliener Perkins took me under their wing and answered my very naive questions about valuation, stock distribution, type of corporation to form, and many more. I raised money, hired engineers, and built a physical prototype that our beta partner locations could install in their shops.
Reflecting on the experience, I chose perhaps the hardest problem to solve in the crypto space. The blockers were economical and political more than technical. I've heard that it's a badge of honor to have had a failed startup in Silicon Valley. To that I say: failure is a wise teacher.
From Wikipedia, Ikigai (生き甲斐, lit. 'a reason for being') is a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living.
I feel blessed to have discovered my ikigai in software engineering.
As a child, I saw myself as an artist. When my Grandfather bought me a computer in my teens, I became infatuated with the early internet. Soon I would build my own PCs, host LAN parties to play Starcraft II: Brood Wars, and teach myself linux through the open-source community and lurking in UNIX message boards. My first job was an internship at Sun Microsystems (thanks to my Dad and two teachers with whom I was the unofficial IT specialist for), which I loved.
In college, I wanted to major in Computer Art. My counselor informed me that Computer Art wasn't an offered degree and it would be risky to define my own degree. She advised me to choose Graphic Design since I was passionate about art and SJSU had a great Graphic Design program. Her logic was that there would be very few opportunities to express myself creatively in Computer Science. I took her advice but soon realized I was on a path that didn't align with me. So I decided to wander into the unknown and dropped out of college. I embarked on a journey of my own design.
Several years later, I discovered bitcoin and traded over 500 btc on localbitcoins, MtGox, and other platforms. I capitalize on global abritrage opportunities. I read books on investing, on day trading, dove deep into how bitcoin worked, and made myself an "expert" on the subject. A Stanford VLAB member discovered me and after chatting over coffee, invited me to speak to faculty and students at Stanford about blockchain technologies. It changed my life to be among so many smart people who asked very smart questions. I was invited to co-chair a panel discussion called Virtual Currencies: Gold Rush or Fools' Gold, The Rise of Bitcoin in a Digital Economy (youtube link), which I happily did.
VLAB, for me, was validation that I could pursue whatever I put my mind to. I saught knowledge, took action, and found a group of people that I highly respected for their humility and intellect. I found people that I could be my nerdy self with, finally!
My background is unconventional and I used to see it as a weakness. But, sometime around 2016, I realized my background is one of my strengths. I am an artist. My canvas is the world around us. My mediums are languages and timeless patterns deployed through a CI tunnel to a target cloud. My work doesn't hang in a museum or gallery, it sits in your pocket or is viewed on your laptop. I write for humans because I am one. I lean towards maximum readability because engineering, like art, is bound to be iterated upon. Writing software is a team activity like a mural painted with friends.
Today, I believe that all skills honed with focus and passion can be forms of creative expression, including computer science and software engineering. Taking an idea and making it real, through whatever means, is my preferred form of artistic expression.