My name is Bert Muthalaly, and I'm a programmer, student of economics, and Recurse Center alum based in New York City, currently taking a sabbatical. I spent the last several years working on Fuchsia at Google. Before that, I worked at Sefaira.

I'm interested in the intersection of engineering, business, and the improvement of human welfare.

My projects are on GitHub, and I write here at somethingdoneright.net.

I aim to focus on the fact that technology is a tool, and it's more important to focus on the effects our technology has on us is than how it's implemented, all else equal.

On the flip side, the way you build your software can drastically change the nature of the process, so it's foolish not to study interesting methods of writing software.

In my projects, I strive to:

  • minimize complexity
  • be aware of prior work in my problem domain
  • avoid writing programs when reusing an already-written program will be effective
  • avoid complex configuration of the software I'm using when possible
  • write comprehensive tests
  • cleanly separate different concerns into different objects, modules, or programs
  • be aware of the trade-offs each design decision entails
  • iterate quickly
  • and try and fail fast if a project is going to fail.