This is the blog of Robert Hafner. It's the combination of development ideas, how to guides, open source announcements, and general ramblings of someone who has spent quite a bit of time moving bytes around.
I tried writing this all in the third person like a professional would, but it came off weird and insincere. So instead you get a brief description of me from me, using my own voice, and we'll see how that works.
Professional
I dropped out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2006 after my first company, a web hosting and custom software development company founded in 2005, managed to be more successful than I was expecting. Between 2005 and 2008 I spent my time helping companies scale and secure their software, with a big focus on ecommerce. This ended up being a "call in case of emergency" style company and where I earned a reputation for my ability to put out fires.
In 2008 I got a call from a friend of mind, Bruce, asking for help. His company, Malwarebytes, had just debuted and their server was already crashing under the traffic load. From that moment on I took over all server infrastructure, security, and server side development for Malwarebytes (including things like our analytics and rapid update platforms). This eventually transitioned into me shutting down my company, moving to California, and expanding my responsibilities at Malwarebytes to the newly created Malware Intelligence division of the company. To say I got an education in security would be an understatement.
In 2014 I was looking for a bit of a change and transitioned to the VP of Engineering at Vicarious AI. There I built out the infrastructure for AI training and experimentation including simulated worlds, rendering farms, robotics integrations, and large scale GPU training. During this time I got to witness first hand the rise of new AI technologies such as the transformer models that are so ubiquitous today. Vicarious AI was ultimately purchased by Intrinsic (a Deepmind company) years after I left.
Although I enjoyed Vicarious AI, I wanted the next company I worked at to have more of a product focus. For that reason I joined Rad AI as the Founding Engineer (VP of Engineering) and first employee. Rad AI uses AI to augment radiologists in order to reduce radiology burnout and improve patient outcomes. During my three years there I hired the initial head of research, built out the engineering team, and created the first iterations of the product and research platforms. This brought Rad AI from an idea to a revenue producing product that achieved Series A funding during covid.
After Rad AI secured funding I decided to take it easy and bounced a round for a bit, including some time writing a book. For the last few years I've been helping to bring scalable AI to a Fortune 30 company, with a focus on developer experience and security.
Open Source
I got my start developing open source mods for a popular open source forum software back when I was in high school, and have loved open source ever since.
My most popular projects actually come from the late 2000s are are two PHP libraries, Stash and JShrink. Stash came from my obsession with performance and is one of the first PHP caching libraries to gain heavy usage. JShrink is a JavaScript minification library written in pure PHP with no dependencies. Although I haven't used PHP professionally since at least 2012 I still maintain these libraries due to their popularity (JShrink is still downloaded from Packagist over 500,000 times a month).
My current favorite projects are mostly in Python. I have a Cookiecutter template, Rob's Awesome Python Template, for generating modern Python projects using a variety of optional libraries. Paracelsus is a utility that generates diagrams from SQLAlchemy databases, and QuasiQueue makes it easier to generate multiprocess applications.
I have a ton of other projects you can find on my portfolio. It has everything from ancient Puppet modules to JavaScript art projects, with a handful of useful web applications mixed in (like the number one search engine listed QC Code generator for laser cutters). If you want to see every one of the 112 projects I've ever contributed to you can view my report on GitBrag, another open source project of mine.
Personal
I grew up in Massachusetts, lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade, and ultimately settled down in Chicago where I currently live with my wife and two cats. Most weekends I am trying to perfect a new recipe, walking around the city, or I'm reading a book while a record is playing.
Disclaimer
This blog is my own opinion and does not represent the opinion or thoughts of my employer. It's actually fair to say that my opinion and my employer's opinions will be very, very different on a variety of topics. I have no authorization to speak on behalf of my employer, nor would I want it. I also don't have purchasing power, so save your sales pitches for someone who does (no I won't introduce you).
AI Notice
Everything in this blog was written by me unless very explicitly stated otherwise. I do not even have Grammerly installed.