Sam Johnson avatar

Sam Johnson
@sam0x17 / sam@durosoft.com
Maryland, USA

GitHub GITHUB CONTRIBUTIONS

GitHub contributions in the last year

👥 CONSULTING CLIENTS / DUROSOFT LLC

Rust / Solana / Polkadot / EVM / ClickHouse / PostgreSQL

  • Bittensor
  • BonkBot
  • Polygon
  • ZisK
  • Orca
  • VictorGov
  • Meanwhile
  • Irys
  • Sorella Labs
  • Book.io
  • Designed Orca's new chain-indexing infrastructure
  • Broke 1M TPS backfilling Solana transactions into Geyser for [stealth mode] client
  • Optimized the Rust behind ZisK's opcode system, helping make it the fastest zkVM in the industry
  • Designed multi-wallet obfuscation/mixing tech for a major Solana web terminal
  • Built onchain 2FA for Solana wallets for [stealth mode]

🎓 EDUCATION

Brown University coat of arms

Brown University

2017 | Master of Science in Computer Science

Dickinson College seal

Dickinson College

2014 | Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

⚙️ TECH SKILLS

  • Rust Rust (9 years)
  • Blockchain AI / Neural Networks (6 years)
  • ClickHouse ClickHouse (2 years)
  • Solana Solana (3 years)
  • Polkadot Polkadot (4 years)
  • Crystal Crystal (7 years)
  • Ruby Ruby (10 years)
  • JavaScript JavaScript (15 years)
  • HTML5 HTML/CSS (15 years)
  • PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (10 years)
  • AWS AWS (10 years)
  • GCP GCP (10 years)

🖥️ INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

Parity Technologies

Rust Core Runtime Engineer | 2022 - 2023

Polkadot / Rust-based L1 Blockchain Ecosystem - Rust

Worked directly with Gavin Wood (original Ethereum CTO) on the Polkadot blockchain ecosystem as a core member of the FRAME team

Authored "benchmarking v2" syntax, the pallet tasks API, and numerous other additions to FRAME

(YC 'S20)

CTO | 2020 - 2022

Corporate Learning Platform - Rust / Ruby on Jets

Led ground-up rebuild of core platform and obtained SOC-2 Type II within first 12 months

Scaled up processes and systems to handle exponential growth and web-scale messaging traffic

Hired and managed a team of 11+ engineers

Guided Arist through seed round and a $24m combo Series A+B round led by Peakspan Capital

Platform is now used at 20% of the Fortune 500

Kagi Kagi Search

Founding Engineer | 2019 - 2020

Privacy-Oriented Search Engine - Rust / Crystal

Hired and managed a team of 6 software engineers

Architected web-scale, global, low-latency search infrastructure

Developed distributed approach to scrape Bing and Google Search with low latency, at scale, undetected

BlockVue

CTO | 2017 - 2019

Commercial Real Estate Virtual Tour Platform - Rust / Ruby on Rails

Managed and mentored a team of 5 engineers across three web and one mobile product

Designed serverless Rails app and frontend that drives 360 degree CRE virtual tour platform

Leveraged artificial neural networks to automatically generate and furnish 3D scenes from floorplans

Wealthbox

Software Engineer | 2015 - 2017

CRM for Financial Advisors - Ruby on Rails / C++

Brought backend into compliance with SEC 17a-4

Developed high-speed C++ database anonymizer

Applications Online, LLC

Software Engineer | 2014 - 2015

College Application Platform - Ruby on Rails

Major contributor to Rails-based college application platform used by Harvard, JHU, Princeton, etc.

Mentored junior developers and made architecture decisions across a suite of high-traffic products

Developed an analytics product that provided in-depth multi-tenant traffic analysis for college applications

🧪 RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport (NUWC)

Scientist | SMART Scholarship Recipient | 2017 – 2020

Deep Learning, C/C++, Python, Rust, Cafe, R-CNN

deep learning • computer vision • machine learning • automated target recognition • algorithms development

US Naval Research Laboratory Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Research Enterprise Intership Program (NREIP)

NREIP Recipient | Researcher | 2014-2015

Deep Learning, C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, SciRuby

Founded the RAPTOR computer vision project, which trains neural networks on synthetic high quality 3D renderings for object detection and 3D pose estimation

Assisted AI research team in dissecting Pedro Domingos' infamous Sum Product Networks paper

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

DHS HS-STEM Recipient | Summer 2013

Rose Compiler Framework, C/C++, Java

Worked with ROSE compiler team to add static analysis code security "checkers" to Compass

Devised a novel technique for efficient memory leak detection in C/C++ code

Received medal for placing in top 10% at the LLNL 2013 Summer Research Symposium

OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS

sin Crates.io Star

WIP alternative to David Tolnay's syn/proc-macro2 ecosystem focused on dev UX and exotic syntax parsing

macro_magic Crates.io Star

Foundational Rust crate that enables importing tokens from foreign items when writing Rust proc macros

docify Crates.io Star

Rust crate that allows developers to dynamically embed code samples from elsewhere in a Rust project directly within doc comments and markdown files

supertrait Crates.io Star

Rust crate that simulates default associated types and (to a lesser extent) const function trait items in stable Rust

interned Crates.io Star

Rust crate that provides a facility for interning arbitrary types

XJoy Star

A C++ driver I wrote that allows disabled users or those who prefer Nintendo Joycons as an input device to use Joycons as a virtual Xbox controller in Microsoft Windows.

PUBLICATIONS