Hi, I'm Wesley, also known as wesl-ee. I program Digital Money to solve problems most people don't care much about (yet).
I am building at Nasdaq with their Digital Assets team; previously I worked as a core dev at Levana on the Terra blockchain developing a perpetual futures market before the collapse of Terra's native UST.
Before I took the leap into building DeFi I worked as a Software Engineer in NVIDIA's Networking Business Unit (NBU). I graduated from North Carolina State University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering and another B.S. in Electrical Engineering. I also accidentally took enough courses during my college tenure to collect my minor in mathematics on the way out the door.
Learning
I am intermediately fluent in Japanese (I can speak / read / write well but many technical things are still are over my head) and have studied at Sophia University in Tōkyō, Japan; I study some every day and hope to pass JLPT-N1 as soon as I am allowed to take the exam. I really, really enjoy learning and this is one of several outlets for me to express this passion.
I like to read a ton too. I love reading technical literature because it expands my depth of knowledge and can improve my problem-solving ability. I also like reading 19th century philosophy and [post]modernist literature. There is a very wide breadth of things which interest me and often I will enter into new topics by researching, reading and marking up books that touch on these ideas. I prefer physical books to digital ones because (1) I have trouble focusing on a screen for long periods of time and (2) it is much easier to write in a book than to take notes in a PDF.
Interests
I love to design and organize systems. I've found that throughout the software (and hardware) spheres, I enjoy working on anything with a sizable problem statement. Though I can bear down and churn out the minute details of a particular element in a certain project, switching between these two worlds of "design" and "detailed implementation" is difficult and counterproductive, and since I am most comfortable being a systems architect in that sense, I have come to appreciate and enjoy the long and sweeping tasks demanded by design on a large scale. Sometimes I will design things I have no intention of implementing or even time to consider implementing, and that's okay, because this process occassionally produces schematics for something I become obsessively and absolutely in love with. At that point I'll pour in all the time I can afford into the project.
I also enjoy performing the regular and specialty maintainance on both of my cars: my '97 BMW 318ti and my 2003 Honda Accord. I learned exclusively from car enthusiast forums / mailing lists on the oldest corners of the Internet. The posted advice is mostly not useful but the 1000+ page manuals hosted on these car forums were invaluable to me, especially when I only had a limited understanding of how cars operated under the hood originally.
Favorite Things
These are more minor things than the above but they are still very important to me:
- Playing games in Virtual Reality
- Drinking and making Coffee
- Cooking, both for myself and with my fiancé
Most of the day I'm hanging out in my Workspace.