Mo

For a while I was a premed student at UVA while working a real estate job. Early in college I didn't care much about what I was doing, the classes I took, relationships with professors, or the college experience in general. In my mind, I was going to graduate with whatever degree and go back to my real estate work in DC.

During my second year, I reconnected with an old friend from high school and together with another friend we started hacking on random things. Actually, let me be completely honest and say that they were the ones hacking. For a while my role was entirely non-technical, I just contributed ideas (if any) and was always dependent on their ability to execute. This is ironic given that we're literally an early stage tech startup and I wasn't coding. At this point in my academic career, I declared my major as computer science after nearly finishing all of my premed requirements. It was probably the best choice given how quickly I could wrap things up and get out to go full time in real estate.

During May of 2023, we finished putting together a prototype for a no-code AI workflows platform built on a document editor. We had this theory that chat interfaces were not necessarily the best way to interact with LLMs, at least not the best way to fully make use of a model's abilities. This led to a few demos and pilots for some businesses in the DC area and also the US Air Force. Volunteering at church was actually pretty helpful in establishing those connections, and working in real estate as well..

In November of 2023, we got into the YC Winter 2024 batch and took a leave of absence to head to San Francisco. SF was a very interesting phase of my life. I don't think there's a better place to build startups, honestly (maybe a few exceptions here and there). However, I didn't feel it was a good place for me to "begin" my learning journey in computer science, given that I had recently switched majors and was surrounded by people who had been coding for years. Imposter syndrome was real. I wrote my first commit to our repo in January of 2024 and it was pretty scary. I remember asking my cofounders like ten questions fearing I would break something. Turns out I wasn't even pushing to main. Through the blessing of God and LLMs, a few months later I ended up building somewhat of a distributed web scraping infrastructure. At this point we had pivoted to building a web-scale recommendation system for long-form content.

For a while, I was stringing together different services and APIs to put together systems that helped my cofounders do their jobs. In all honesty, half the time I had no clue what I was doing and couldn't even reason about decisions for the startup itself. Sure, I could have used LLMs to explain things the same way I was asking them to do the work, but part of me was focused on just delivering what was needed rather than taking the time to learn how to do it well, one of the biggest regrets I have from my time there.

Fast-forwarding to July of 2025, I decided to leave the startup and head back to the DC area since my family had moved to the States. This was expected, but definitely sooner than anticipated, if you were following what was happening in the Middle East, you could probably guess why the timeline moved up quickly.

I decided to return to school to finish my degree. It was my mom's wish all along and a good time buffer while I figure out my next step. Through almost two years in SF building different products, I never really figured out what I was interested in or what I wanted to do long term. I guess it was building product but I wasn't fully sure. I always had circumstances to deal with, usually things related to survival and family, and never had the space to slow down and reflect honestly.

This semester I'm taking an advanced computer architecture class, which is probably the most interesting class I've taken during my time at UVA. The class is not only very technical but also small enough that when the professor asks a question, one of us has to answer, which forces me to be very prepared walking in. I also started doing research with a PhD student working under the same professor. The work is very compiler-heavy, and I obviously had no clue how compilers worked so I've been self-studying for the past few weeks. For the first time in a while, I'm actually in tune with what I'm learning and it's been really fun. Most of what I write here will be about what I'm learning through research and projects along the way.

I'm at a phase of my life where I'm learning faster than I ever have, and writing is a way to organize my thoughts as I go. It's also a way to reinforce what I'm learning by attempting to explain it here. I'm not trying to teach anyone, there are better blogs for that. I just need somewhere to put my thoughts down and hopefully get some good feedback along the way.

A few last notes: English is my second language, so I run my drafts through an LLM to clean up grammar and phrasing before posting. I also come from a non-technical background, which means I will probably make wrong claims at some point. This is a living document, I'll update posts as my understanding evolves. That said, if you read something that sounds wrong, please email me :). This post was originally just a test to see if Velite was working. It grew into something more, so here we are. I'm also using Markdown so I'll try to get fancy with formatting, if needed.