About
I grew up in Iraq and learned to program by making GTA mods in 2006. At the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, I founded ASITA, the student IT association, and was design editor of AUIS Voice. In 2012 I won the Iraqi round of Microsoft's Imagine Cup and went to the worldwide finals in Sydney.
I've built software professionally since 2013, in San Francisco and then New York. I founded CongruentAI and co-founded KayOS. I've been CTO twice, Head of ML twice, and a founding engineer at On Deck.
Program synthesis is what got me into research: making machines find programs from specifications. I contributed to Description2Code in 2016 and built Hopper, a software engineering assistant, in 2017. Wanting to check whether generated programs actually worked pulled me into verification, type theory, homotopy type theory and algebraic topology.
Somewhere along the way I read Cédric Villani's Birth of a Theorem. He wears a giant spider brooch. I watched his lectures. I started getting weirdly into spiders. I was rewatching Spider-Man. That's how deep I was.
The research continues through Erdős Navigator and Bourbaki, the work I do with the Sutro Group, and the infrastructure I build for coding agents: staxtrace, Chimera and Novalis. I write about the work at yad.codes and programsynthesis.pub.
In New York, I write and perform standup, at clubs like New York Comedy Club. I like food, I like jokes, I like learning, and that's my comedy. I created and produce Baklava Comedy, with fresh baklava at the door. I built and run Library of Comedy, a comedy archive tucked into a corner of the internet, and its live show, where we give away books. I photograph other comics' shows and document their work. The photographs are theirs to use, with a credit.