Stencia

software engineering

I enjoy building software, by myself and with others. I am currently a staff engineer at TextNow. Before that I was at Nike.

Medical Burn by Stencia

See here.

intellectual pursuits

Published co-authored papers from back in the day: https://stanford.academia.edu/WilliamBraynen/Papers
I built the game-theoretic agent-based models for these papers.

Also, my thoughts about teaching software engineering in a computer science department: “Teaching Philosophy for Software Engineering” (2021).

From 2021 to 2023, I led the Software Innovation Lab (which was a new program I created) and the software engineering track (thus rebooting the track) at Oregon State University. I also taught CS 561; see student reviews at RateMyProfessor.com. The problem I was trying to address was bridging the gap between CS programs and the software-engineering industry. Creating the Software Innovation Lab meant: (a) creating a process for innovation and helping students ideate, (b) setting up standards for the process and the final product (which included getting folks used to standard industry tooling and socializing them as ICs to work collaboratively (e.g. reviewing each other’s pull requests), (c) creating a training pipeline (CS 561 -> CS 501 -> CS 506 -> defense), (d) recruiting industry mentors, and (e) creating an alumni network from past lab graduates. We produced a number of interesting projects, often (but not always) focusing on full-stack architecture with inversion of control. I am very proud of the students I advised in the lab and the program.

My B.S. was a double major in Computer Science and Applied Math. In graduate school I studied Philosophy minoring in Cognitive Science. From 2012 to 2014, I was a fellow at Stanford University.